Nvidia shipped the fifth generation of DLSS on 3 September 2026, first in NBA 2K27. The technique is called 3D-Guided Neural Rendering, and it runs on the Tensor Cores as the final stage of the pipeline, working with raster, ray tracing and path tracing alike.
What can run it
GeForce RTX 50 cards only, desktop and laptop: the 5090, 5080, 5070 Ti, 5070, the 5060 family and the 5050, plus GeForce NOW Ultimate rigs on RTX 5080. Nothing from the 40 series or older.
Nvidia says it made the technique five times faster in six months: at its reveal on 16 March 2026 it needed two 5090s, and now it runs on one card.
And here the trouble starts
Three independent labs published their measurements on the same day, 4 September, and all say the same thing: the technique costs roughly half the performance.
TechSpot, by Tim Schiesser, in NBA 2K27 at maximum settings: a 5090 at 4K goes from 192 to 76 frames, a drop of sixty per cent. A 5080 from 185 to 53, seventy-one per cent. A 5070 from 124 to 33, seventy-three per cent. Its conclusion is that DLSS 5’s processing time dominates the whole frame time, so lowering other settings barely helps.
Guru3D, by Hilbert Hagedoorn: at 1440p, from 140 to 59 frames with no frame generation, a drop of nearly fifty-eight per cent. He found the improvement clearest in close-ups and replays, and said it improves shading and material separation while preserving geometry.
DSOGaming, by John Papadopoulos, on a 5090 at maximum ray tracing: 1080p from 180 to 134, 1440p from 176 to 108, and 4K at 63 frames. His verdict is blunter: during gameplay, the visual improvements are not that large.
The story is the gap
Nvidia’s own page advertises numbers like 370 frames at 4K on a 5090. As PC Gamer noted on 1 September, that figure has six-times multi frame generation stacked on top, not the technique on its own. It put the real cost at between fifty and sixty per cent.
The one piece of good news: this is a checkbox in the settings. You can turn it on or leave it off.
What we could not verify
We could not confirm whether RTX 50 cards are on sale in Kuwait or at what dinar price. No source gives a memory-consumption figure. And only one game has shipped with the technique so far.
Photo: the cooling fans of a graphics card. CC0 via Wikimedia Commons, cropped.
Sources: Nvidia’s own DLSS 5 page and its press release of 16 March 2026; TechSpot, Guru3D and DSOGaming on 4 September 2026; and PC Gamer on 1 September 2026.
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