NVIDIA has confirmed that DLSS 5 will officially launch on September 3 alongside NBA 2K27, and it will remain exclusive to GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs. When asked directly at a Gamescom technical briefing whether older cards would ever receive support, NVIDIA gave a flat answer: "It's RTX 50-series only."

The model runs on Blackwell's fifth-generation Tensor cores, and there's no fallback path for RTX 40-series or anything older. That confirmation lines up with what modders had already found by digging through the leaked DLSS 5 DLL that surfaced through an early NBA 2K27 build last week, which contained executable code gated specifically to Blackwell hardware.

According to NVIDIA, DLSS 5 is its largest and most complex model to date, and the priority has been optimizing it specifically for RTX 50 hardware rather than stretching it across older Tensor core generations. However, modders patched around the CUDA binaries and got Neural Rendering running on an RTX 4090, with performance dropping by roughly 36 to 39 percent in Control.