Nvidia’s DLSS 5 neural rendering has now shipped inside a real game, NBA 2K27, and the first laptop benchmarks confirm the trade-off Nvidia has stayed vague about since announcing it: sharper lighting and facial detail bought at the cost of a large chunk of frame rate, clawed back only by leaning on Multi Frame Generation hard enough to push the displayed number back into triple figures. It is the clearest look yet at what neural rendering actually costs, rather than what Nvidia claims it delivers.
The tests ran on a Lenovo Legion Pro 7 laptop built around an RTX 5090, the only GPU tier Nvidia currently supports for the feature. NBA 2K27 is still the sole game running DLSS 5, and nothing else on the RTX 50-series lineup can switch it on yet. That narrow rollout is deliberate: Nvidia is using one title to prove the neural rendering pipeline works before asking every RTX 50-series owner to trade frame rate for it.
What DLSS 5 neural rendering costs in frame rate
Notebookcheck’s hands-on testing found a substantial performance penalty at both 1440p and 4K once DLSS 5’s neural rendering is switched on, and because that figure comes from independent testing rather than a number Nvidia supplied, it’s the more useful one to trust. The penalty is consistent with running a much heavier per-frame model than the transformer-based DLSS 4 pipeline it replaces.
Multi Frame Generation is what makes the feature usable at all: turned on, it interpolates extra frames and pushes the displayed frame rate well into triple digits, even though the GPU is doing far less native rendering underneath. That gap between rendered and displayed frames is the whole pitch of DLSS 5, and also the catch, because the interpolated frames carry no new game state, only smoother motion between the frames the GPU actually computed.
The RTX 5090’s already-stretched power budget
Teqpost calculates that a 1440p panel running at 370Hz, the refresh rate Multi Frame Generation is built to fill, has to move 1,364 million pixels a second between GPU and display. That is the extra throughput DLSS 5 asks the same RTX 5090 to sustain while running a heavier rendering model, on a chip we’ve already flagged as working close to its limits: mods testing DLSS 5 on the RTX 5090 exposed how close its power connector runs to the rated limit under load.
A laptop RTX 5090 has a lower power ceiling than the desktop card that story tested, so the frame-rate collapse Notebookcheck measured here is consistent with a GPU already working near its ceiling before neural rendering added its own overhead.
DLSS 5 comes to RTX 40-series, eventually
Nvidia originally pitched DLSS 5 as exclusive to RTX 50-series Blackwell hardware, ruling out any RTX 40-series Ada Lovelace support. It has now reversed that position, confirming a DLSS 5 port for RTX 40-series cards after weeks of modder pressure and community backlash, according to Guru3D. Nvidia has not given a release date, and says its optimisation work stays focused on the RTX 50-series for now, which makes the RTX 40-series port a confirmed destination rather than a working feature.
Worth watching: whether Nvidia attaches an actual date to the RTX 40-series port once RTX 50-series optimisation settles down, and whether DLSS 5 spreads past NBA 2K27 to a second game now that the exclusivity stance has already cracked once.
