// PC GAMER — GAMING
DLSS 5 comes with a massive 50-60% performance hit, so I hope you like lower frame rates with your dose of AI image enhancement
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I walked into Nvidia's DLSS 5 demo last week with some preconceptions, I'll be honest. I hadn't enjoyed the images it had produced to date, and I was sceptical about the benefits it could bring to our beloved games. Not to mention the troubling notion of AI-altered images entering into our hobby, even if you can turn them off with a simple checkbox.
The good news is, DLSS 5 is capable of looking pretty good once the settings have been tweaked by actual game developers. The very bad news is, Nvidia says turning DLSS 5 on will currently reduce performance by 50-60%. And that's across the board—no matter the game.
Nvidia was keen to point out that, just six months ago, DLSS 5 required two RTX 5090s to run. So, a 5x improvement since then is something to hold within our collective hats. But tanking frame rates is very unlikely to improve DLSS 5's perception within the PC gaming community, that's for certain.
Looking at the basic performance charts Nvidia has provided us so far, the ultra-high frame rate figures are based on 6x Multi Frame Generation. So, while the little RTX 5060 can churn out a 258 fps result in NBA 2K27 at 1080p Ultra settings with ray tracing and DLSS 5 enabled, the game underneath will actually be running at around 43 fps.
At 4K, the same game settings result in a 370 fps average on an RTX 5090, or a 233 fps average on an RTX 5080. That's with Performance-level upscaling, though, and with 6x MFG doing some seriously heavy lifting once more.
If you've spent thousands of bucks on a high-end graphics card, I'd imagine that running games with the upscaling and frame generation settings near their limits to achieve high frame rates is probably not what you had in mind.
All of which makes me wonder if the AI-ification of DLSS 5 is really the biggest barrier to its acceptance. I have my own deep, dark concerns about DLSS 5, AI in general, and its pervasive hooks making their way into our hobby. But if the tech is capable of slicing the frame rate in half, all of this might be a moot point.
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The Nvidia folk I spoke to were keen to point out that performance improvements are already on the way. But given that so many gamers are stuck with older graphics cards, thanks to the ongoing pricing crisis that seems destined to become much worse before it gets better, I do wonder who the tech is currently for.