DLSS 5 Confirmed for Older GPUs, But Nvidia Focuses on RTX 50 First

Nvidia's DLSS 5 neural rendering technology made its official debut yesterday in NBA 2K27, and it's currently exclusive to the latest RTX 5000 series graphics cards. However, it appears that support will eventually extend to older hardware.

On Nvidia's official forums, a company representative stated that DLSS 5 support will be expanded to the RTX 40 series in the future, though it may take some time. The representative explained, "Our current focus is on optimizing performance for the GeForce RTX 50 Series with model updates expected later this fall," and added, "once RTX 50 Series performance is more fully tuned, we plan to work on expanding official support to the GeForce RTX 40 Series."

This suggests that Nvidia's immediate priority is ensuring smooth performance on current-gen cards before adapting the technology for the Ada Lovelace architecture. This approach makes sense, especially given my brief experience with DLSS 5 in NBA 2K27. The visual improvements were surprisingly subtle—certainly not the dramatic changes some Reddit posts have suggested. While the technology did enhance the game's graphics, it came at a significant performance cost, even on an RTX 5090.

Enabling DLSS 5 on my system dropped pre-frame-generation frame rates from around 57-60 fps to roughly 37 fps—a substantial 43% performance hit. If the most powerful GPU on the market takes that kind of hit, I'm skeptical about how well an RTX 4080 would fare, especially with its older Tensor Cores.

That said, Nvidia has made considerable progress since the technology was first unveiled in March, when it required two RTX 5090s to run. Now, the company claims model performance has improved by about 5x. With further optimization, the performance penalty could shrink over time. But until I see it in action on older hardware, I'll remain cautiously optimistic.