NVIDIA has shared first-party performance numbers for DLSS 5, arriving September 3 in NBA 2K27. The model is five times faster than its March GTC debut, which required two RTX 5090 GPUs. Now it runs on a single RTX 50-series card, from RTX 5060 to RTX 5090, marking a commendable improvement in six months.

Despite the speedup, DLSS 5 still incurs a 50-60% performance penalty versus native rendering. In NBA 2K27 at 4K Ultra with ray tracing and Multi Frame Generation, the RTX 5090 achieves roughly 370 FPS with DLSS 5 enabled, while the RTX 5080 reaches about 233 FPS. At 1440p, the RTX 5090 approaches 600 FPS and the RTX 5070 exceeds 260 FPS. 1080p benchmarks show the RTX 5090 nearing 800 FPS, though these are less relevant to real-world usage.

NVIDIA notes DLSS 5's performance cost remains significant, likely due to Multi Frame Generation doing much of the work. The figures come directly from NVIDIA and should be viewed cautiously until independent validation occurs. Further optimization is expected later this year.