NVIDIA has officially confirmed that DLSS 5 neural rendering will be brought to the previous-generation GeForce RTX 40-Series "Ada Lovelace" GPUs. Previously, it was believed that this advanced technology would be exclusive to the latest GeForce RTX 50-Series "Blackwell" and future models. NVIDIA is prioritizing hardware-software cooptimization, ensuring that the launch on the RTX 40-Series is secondary to the primary focus of optimizing performance for the RTX 50-Series.

DLSS 5 is described as NVIDIA's most computationally demanding model to date. Since its initial announcement in March, the company has achieved a 5X performance gain, with more improvements expected. The current focus remains on tuning performance for the GeForce RTX 50 Series, with model updates planned for later this fall. Once the RTX 50 Series performance is fully optimized, NVIDIA plans to expand official support to the GeForce RTX 40 Series.

Officially, DLSS 5 launches with 2K Games' latest NBA 2K27, which goes live today. It is supported on all GeForce RTX 50-Series GPUs, RTX 50 laptops, and GeForce NOW, allowing gamers to enjoy the benefits of neural rendering. For now, DLSS 5 is optimized for "Blackwell's" fifth-generation Tensor cores, while support for the fourth-generation Tensor cores in "Ada Lovelace" is still being optimized. Readers may recall that NVIDIA initially used two GeForce RTX 5090 GPUs for DLSS 5 demos, later settling on a single GPU with optimizations. For last-generation GPUs to achieve good performance, we will need to wait a bit longer.