Monday, October 19th 2026
NVIDIA's Faster DLSS 5 Model Gets Extracted From NBA 2K27, Modders Report Up to 90% Gains
NVIDIA shipped its faster DLSS 5 Neural Rendering model with NBA 2K27 on October 16, and it didn't take modders long to pull it out and test it elsewhere. Renan Maniero on X extracted the new 310.9.16.0 build of the DLL. That lets people inject it into games that don't officially support DLSS 5 through tools like RenoDX and OptiScaler. The new DLL also keeps the older model around as Preset A, with the new one sitting under Preset B, so comparing the two is as simple as switching presets. Gaming Optimized on X did exactly that, and found the new model running up to 90% faster than the old one in The Witcher 3. The channel points out that the gain varies from game to game, so 90% looks like the best case rather than the norm.
That roughly aligns with NVIDIA's own claims. The company says the October update shrinks the model by 24% to roughly 118 million parameters, cuts VRAM use at 4K by 20%, and runs the neural rendering workload up to 2x faster than the September version. NVIDIA also quoted up to 40% higher frame rates in NBA 2K27 specifically. Officially, DLSS 5 is still limited to RTX 50-series GPUs and GeForce NOW. NVIDIA plans to bring it to the RTX 40-series, though there's no date yet, and there's no word on RTX 30 or RTX 20 support. Modders, apparently, aren't waiting, since the OptiScaler README notes a modified runtime that gets it running on RTX 20-series cards as well.
Sources:
Renan Maniero on X, Gaming Optimized on X, via Tom's Hardware
That roughly aligns with NVIDIA's own claims. The company says the October update shrinks the model by 24% to roughly 118 million parameters, cuts VRAM use at 4K by 20%, and runs the neural rendering workload up to 2x faster than the September version. NVIDIA also quoted up to 40% higher frame rates in NBA 2K27 specifically. Officially, DLSS 5 is still limited to RTX 50-series GPUs and GeForce NOW. NVIDIA plans to bring it to the RTX 40-series, though there's no date yet, and there's no word on RTX 30 or RTX 20 support. Modders, apparently, aren't waiting, since the OptiScaler README notes a modified runtime that gets it running on RTX 20-series cards as well.
13 Comments on NVIDIA's Faster DLSS 5 Model Gets Extracted From NBA 2K27, Modders Report Up to 90% Gains
I also noted that 1% lows dont' seem to have the same performance uplift as averages, particularly on mid-range and lower end cards. There might be some overhead going on here that has to do with the infrastructure of the model that wasn't optimized here.
It requires a lot of attention and optimization from the game developer.
I was convinced DSLSS5 would be terrible, but the fact that the very first iteration already looks decent in some games that were never meant to run with it makes me think that later versions used in game that were designed to use it could actually be pretty good (Also I'm sure if an RTX 6000 ever comes to consumer market, it will run it with less of a performance hit than current gen cards).
In CP2077 maxed with RR and with 6xMFG, all are after SR at Performance 1080P:
Off: ~450 FPS
Preset A: ~340 FPS
Preset B: ~385 FPS
DLSS 5 is also less accurate and is screen space only. It doesn't have knowledge of off screen lighting. This is why colors shift as the camera moves with DLSS 5, although Nvidia tries to hide this by spreading out the color change over time.
It also carries with it the same issues other image to image AI models have. Statistical outliers are removed (causing color crush is brights and darks), there's concept bleed, it converges outputs (games will be pushed towards DLSS 5's understanding of lighting, style, ect), and it slightly fries the image (an issue with every image generation model where each output get's progressively more fried).