Tech reviewers at Hardware Unboxed have published the first full test of Nvidia's DLSS 5, finding that turning the feature on causes a dramatic drop in frame rates across every GeForce RTX 50 graphics card they tried.
Unlike earlier versions of DLSS, which mainly boosted frame rates by generating extra frames, the fifth generation is built to improve in-game image quality using artificial intelligence rather than to add speed.
On the RTX 5090, Nvidia's top-of-the-line card with a retail price of around a thousand dollars, average frame rates at 4K resolution on maximum settings fell from a native 192 frames per second to 76 frames per second once DLSS 5 was switched on.
Weaker cards lose even more
Cheaper cards fared worse. The RTX 5080 lost about 71 percent of its performance, dropping to 53 frames per second, while the RTX 5070 Ti managed just 44 frames per second. Entry-level cards such as the RTX 5050 fell to between 7 and 15 frames per second.
DLSS 5 is so far available in only one game, NBA 2K27, so all of the testing was carried out there.
Why the frame rate collapses
According to the tech reviewers, the bottleneck is not graphics settings but the fixed amount of time the neural network stage itself takes to run. Because the technology processes the finished frame, lowering image quality or turning on upscaling barely helps. Even on the RTX 5090, dropping settings from Ultra to Low added only 9 frames per second.
The processing delay depends directly on resolution and the power of a card's tensor cores. A single 4K frame takes the RTX 5090 about 7.9 milliseconds to process, while the RTX 5060 Ti needs 31 milliseconds, a gap that makes 60 frames per second physically out of reach for mid-range cards with the feature switched on.
Rollout and what comes next
It remains unclear how noticeable DLSS 5's visual improvements will be and whether they will justify the performance cost, but the early tests already show the new technology demands far more computing power than previous versions of DLSS.
DLSS is Nvidia's suite of AI-driven rendering tools for GeForce RTX graphics cards, first introduced to boost frame rates through upscaling and frame generation. DLSS 5 is currently supported only on the RTX 5000 series, though Nvidia has said the technology will later come to RTX 40-series cards as well.
UNIAN has previously reported that Nvidia does not plan to release its next generation of gaming graphics cards until at least 2028, and has instead returned the five-year-old RTX 3060 to sale.
