// TOM'S HARDWARE US — HARDWARE & GADGET
We tested DLSS 5 in NBA 2K27 with every RTX 50-series GPU — first official release comes with a big performance hit, but almost every Blackwell card can run it at 1080p
Once you see it, you won't want to turn it off, even with the frame rate hit.
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Nvidia's DLSS 5 has arrived in NBA 2K27, and we've been up since midnight testing it across every RTX 50-series graphics card to see what the first official implementation of this tech can do and how it compares to the community-implemented mods that have been circulating over the past couple weeks.
Before we discuss the performance cost of DLSS 5, many will ask whether this tech is even worth getting excited about, given the intense controversy that it's sparked ever since Nvidia revealed it earlier this year.
This first-party implementation of DLSS 5, tuned under the full control of 2K Games' art directors and artists, looks incredible, full stop. If you see it running, you will want to leave it on. It doesn't look like "slop" or a cheap filter. It just looks correct, or at least more correct.
For just a couple of examples, without DLSS 5, even at ultra settings and with RT, the game has a slightly "plastic" or "flat" look. Faces can have a waxy uniformity that immediately indicates that you're looking at a video game, not a live broadcast. Hair looks totally and unnaturally flat. The whites of eyes can be unnaturally bright, giving a sort of googly-eye or doll-like effect that immediately broke my sense of immersion. I didn't think any of this would be a big deal for a sports game, but it all stands out.
DLSS 5 breathes incredible life into NBA 2K27. Skin looks like real flesh and blood. Eyes are rendered with the proper tones, depth, and sparkle. Hair looks a billion times more realistic. Every human on screen just looks more alive. You won't entirely forget that you're looking at a game, but it becomes much easier to suspend disbelief and get lost in the action.
My experience slapping DLSS 5 mods into games has produced promising but sometimes mixed results. If the polished experience that NBA 2K25 delivers is any indication, I can't wait for more studios to get their hands on it and integrate it into their games under the care of the same artists that created them.
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We did our best to deliver clean test numbers in the short time we've had with NBA 2K27. Performance in this can be tricky to measure. Benchmarking in the hub worlds or cutscenes will deliver lower performance than on the court, and even then, in-game events like fouls and time-outs will also result in skewed numbers if you're not careful. We picked a repeatable match-up from the game's career mode and sampled 60 seconds of continuous gameplay with DLSS 5 on and off, making sure to restart if we ran into any of the scripted events above.