DLSS 5 Is Coming to RTX 40 After All. Do Not Buy an RTX 50 for It.

On September 3 Nvidia shipped DLSS 5 in exactly one game, NBA 2K27, with a GeForce driver to match, and told everyone it needed an RTX 50 series card. Not "works best on". Needed. The line reported at the time was that there was no fallback path for RTX 40 owners at all.

Then, within days, an Nvidia spokesperson told The Verge the feature would come to RTX 40 series GPUs "at a later date". The longer version of the statement, as Wccftech and others carried it, is that once RTX 50 performance is more fully tuned, Nvidia plans to work on expanding official support to the GeForce RTX 40 series. No date. No word on RTX 30.

If you own a 4070 and spent the first week of September wondering whether you had just been told to buy a new card, the answer is no, and it was no even before Nvidia walked it back. The reasons take about five minutes.

What DLSS 5 is

The name suggests a faster version of the upscaler everyone already uses. It is not that. Nvidia's own driver announcement describes DLSS 5 as three things bundled together: Super Resolution and Multi Frame Generation, both of which shipped in DLSS 4.5, plus a new component called 3D-Guided Neural Rendering.

That new component is the whole story. It is an AI model that runs after the game engine has drawn the frame and adds lighting and material detail the engine did not compute: subsurface scattering so skin looks like skin instead of painted plastic, tighter contact shadows, better ambient occlusion in the creases. Nvidia calls the models "artist-guided", meaning 2K's art team trained them against the scanned athletes so the faces stay the faces. In a basketball game where the camera spends half its time on close-ups of sweating people, that is a sensible place to debut it.

It also means DLSS 5 is a graphics setting. It is Ultra-plus. It takes a frame that was already rendered and spends more GPU time making it prettier. Super Resolution gives you frames back. Frame Generation manufactures them. Neural rendering takes them away, and the only question is how many.

What it costs

Nvidia has been unusually open about that cost, because the story it wants to tell is one of optimization. Per the account Wccftech relays, the model in March needed two RTX 5090s to run at all. By May it ran on one. By August it ran on every RTX 50 card, a five-fold gain in six months, and the launch version still carried what Nvidia describes as a 50 to 60 percent frame-rate hit on average. The stated goal is to get that down to 10 to 15 percent by the end of the year through further model updates.

Tom's Hardware tested it across the full RTX 50 stack and their headline is the honest summary: a big performance hit, and almost every Blackwell card can run it at 1080p. We have not run it ourselves and are not going to pretend otherwise; our numbers come from a model, not a test bench. But the shape is clear from Nvidia's own figures. This is a feature that, today, gives up roughly half the frame rate of whatever card runs it, in one game, in exchange for better faces.

That is also why the RTX 40 delay makes technical sense rather than being pure market segmentation. RTX 40 cards do not support Multi Frame Generation, and Wccftech's read of Nvidia's position is that the model needs more aggressive tuning before it is viable without it. Nvidia's phrasing, "once RTX 50 series performance is more fully tuned", is a way of saying the model is not yet cheap enough to be worth running on the older cards. When it is, the 40 series gets it. That is a reasonable engineering position. It was just delivered, at launch, as "you need a new card".

Who this touches

Fewer people than the headlines suggested, and mostly not the ones the headlines were aimed at.

Start with what people own. In August's Steam hardware survey the most common graphics card on the platform was the RTX 3060 at 3.92% of Windows systems. The 4060 was at 3.60%, the 4060 Ti at 2.37% and the 4070 at 1.78%. The single biggest install base in PC gaming is a card Nvidia has not mentioned in any DLSS 5 statement at all, and the 40 series cards under it are 8GB and 12GB parts that will feel a 50 percent frame cost far more than a 5090 does.

Our own tools tell the same story from a different angle. Of the graphics cards visitors put through the bottleneck checker and FPS calculator so far in September, counting each visitor once per tool, RTX 30 series cards outnumber RTX 40 series cards by more than one and a half to one. Those are people checking what they have or what they are about to buy, and for most of them DLSS 5 was never on the table.

And then there is the game. One title. A basketball sim that Nvidia's own numbers put at 370 fps at 4K Ultra with ray tracing on a 5090, which is precisely why it could afford to give half of them back. The announced follow-ups are not live. Until a game you play ships with it, DLSS 5 support is a line on a spec sheet, not a thing you can turn on.

Should you buy an RTX 50 card for it?

No, and we would say that even if Nvidia had held the line on exclusivity.

Buy a graphics card for the frame rate it gives you in the games you play, at the resolution you play them, and check that number before you spend anything. That is the whole job of the FPS calculator: put in the card you have, put in the one you are considering, and see whether the gap is one you would notice. If your 4070 is doing 90 fps at 1440p in the games you care about, a 5070 doing 100 is not an upgrade you will feel, and DLSS 5 will make that 5070 slower, not faster, in the one game that has it.

If your card is short of frames, that is a real reason to upgrade, and it has nothing to do with this announcement. The 5070 and RX 9070 XT are the cards that move a 1440p build into high-refresh territory this year, and our pairing guide covers which processor keeps each one busy. Buy one of those because your frame rate says to. Not because a spec sheet says DLSS 5.

The opinion, stated plainly: DLSS 5 is the first DLSS that makes your card slower, and Nvidia launched it as a reason to buy a faster card. That was a marketing decision and it lasted about a week. Ignore it, keep the 40 series card you have, and let the model get cheap on Nvidia's time rather than yours.

Short version

• DLSS 5 launched September 3 in NBA 2K27 with driver 616.64, RTX 50 only, "no fallback" for RTX 40.
• Days later Nvidia told The Verge RTX 40 support is coming at a later date, after RTX 50 tuning. No date. RTX 30 unmentioned.
• It is 3D-Guided Neural Rendering on top of DLSS 4.5's upscaling and frame generation: better lighting and materials, at a 50 to 60 percent frame cost at launch by Nvidia's own account, targeted to fall to 10 to 15 percent by year end.
• One game supports it. The most common card on Steam, the RTX 3060, is not on any version of the list.
• Upgrade on frame rate, never on a feature list. Check yours first.

Related reading

• DLSS 4.5 and Multi Frame Generation, explained
• The RTX 5060 launched: who should buy it
• Steam hardware survey: 16GB of VRAM is now the most common