DLSS 5 is finally here. Well, its been officially released in one game, anyway, after modders got their hands on it last week and made the actual launch somewhat redundant. Still, I've been testing Nvidia's new AI image-enhancing tech in NBA 2K27, the latest hoop-shooting game in the long-running series, and I have bad news: even on a high-end RTX 5080 rig, it's seriously punishing when it comes to performance.
Which isn't a huge surprise, given that Nvidia itself estimated a 50-60% DLSS 5 performance hit in the briefings last week. Still, my early testing shows it can tank your frame rate considerably harder than that, even on a PC that costs well over $3,000 in 2026.
I threw a pre-release version of NBA 2K27 at one of our benchmarking rigs, an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, RTX 5080-equipped, 32 GB DDR5 behemoth. And while this particular PC can make mincemeat of the game's relatively lightweight hardware needs overall, turning on DLSS 5 can drop the average frame rate by up to 73% in certain scenarios.
It's capable of looking very pretty in this particular game, that's for sure. But my jaw has dropped several times during my testing, and not always for the reasons Nvidia may have hoped for. To the benchmarks, then.
