Nvidia’s controversial DLSS 5 is officially here, launching alongside NBA 2K27. There’s a lot to discuss with Nvidia’s latest brand of AI graphics card wizardry, because it has a very different feel from the previous iterations of DLSS. Where others have been all about slightly lessening your graphical fidelity in the name of increasing your FPS, DLSS 5 is overtly trying to “improve” your graphics, and the results on your frame rates sure are interesting.
I’ve now had the chance to go hands-on with DLSS 5 in my own setup while playing NBA 2K27. I’ve talked plenty in the past six months about DLSS 5, my apprehensions towards it, and why I think it might be a toxic influence on the games industry, but at the same time, I accept that all we’ve really seen about it to this point are comparative stills that show the AI model rather aggressively changing character models from games like Resident Evil Requiem, Hogwarts Legacy, NBA 2K27, and Starfield. It’s one thing to compare DLSS on and off shots, but it’s another thing entirely to see it in action when playing games.
So, I decided to put all my fears, doubts, and frustrations with generative AI to one side for a few hours. I went hands-on with DLSS 5 in the only game that has official support for it at launch, NBA 2K27, to see how it impacts the experience of playing games. Here’s what I found works and what doesn’t work about the latest version of DLSS.
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What works: Photorealistic environments, NPCs, and character models (in games like this)
(Image credit: 2K)
NBA 2K27 is a sports simulation game. In other words, it’s not Mario Tennis Aces; it isn’t trying to convey an arcade experience of playing a sport. It’s trying to recreate, to the best of a video game’s ability, a pro-level basketball match on your screen, under your virtual control. For that reason, it’s shooting for an element of photorealism that the developers clearly believe suits a technology suite like DLSS 5.
I am ardently against using generative AI to enhance video game art styles for a lot of reasons, but even I have to admit, in NBA 2K27, DLSS 5 actually does pay off. Thankfully, it’s not actually as exaggerated as we’ve seen in Nvidia‘s marketing stills so far. Yes, there are times when I’ll catch a glimpse of a face in the game and alarm bells will immediately start ringing.
“That’s AI”, my brain will scream, “that looks like slop because it’s overly sharp and looks pseudo-illustrated”. But again, I have to be fair here; most of the time, I didn’t actually notice DLSS 5 running in a game like this because it all looks pretty true to life to begin with.
(Image credit: 2K)
DLSS 5 is at its best when it’s working in the background of what you’re looking at. The surface of the court, the environments and objects in the background, the stuff that you probably wouldn’t pay a lot of attention to, but does all work together to form a cohesive, photorealistic whole.
For the most part, DLSS 5 isn’t yassifying – certainly because when actually playing through a basketball game, you’re not close enough to character models to really notice its impact on faces. What DLSS 5 is doing is adding a bit more depth, a bit more lighting bounce, and almost a second layer of 3D structure to everything it touches. In some instances, like with barriers around the arena, it’ll add more detail. On the surface of the court, it’ll add a bit more tone, and on NPCs’ faces in crowds, it’ll add a bit more polish that game developers clearly have never been able to get to.
For a game like this, DLSS 5 actually makes things look pretty impressively photoreal.
What doesn’t work: Lip-syncing on hyper-real faces
Where it all falls flat on its realistic face is when DLSS 5 is working during dialogue scenes. NBA 2K27 includes these quarterly court-side interviews along with plenty of cutscenes in its career mode. With DLSS 5 working and making facial models look that bit more photoreal, there’s a real mismatch where animation and upscaling do not meet.
The result is that you have hyper-real looking faces whose lips and mouths are not working in exact sync, or enunciating realistically with what they’re supposed to be saying. There’s a layer of game development that doesn’t align with DLSS 5’s upscaling. It’s an uncanny attention to detail that’s let down by the lip-syncing animation in 2K’s game, and that takes me completely out of it every time.
(Image credit: 2K)
A quick fix for game developers looking to make their games more photorealistic- this is not, because our human brains can’t help but catch this uncanny misalignment as something “off”. It immediately looks like an AI-generated video of someone speaking that doesn’t pass the Turing test.
In a sports game like this, it’s not a hugely common occurrence, but when DLSS 5 inevitably reaches more narrative-based singleplayer games, I think this could be one of its biggest downfalls.
What works: Performance with Dynamic Multi-frame Gen on
I tested DLSS 5’s performance on my own gaming PC, which houses a PNY Slim RTX 5080. There’s no built-in benchmarking tool within NBA 2K27, but I decided I wanted a feel for how Nvidia’s latest bag of tricks would impact general gameplay, so I sampled the frame rate during a “play now” match between the NY Knicks and LA Lakers. I wasn’t able to get the exact same chunk of gameplay in these tests, so it’s not an exact science, but I think it’s much more important to give you a feel for how DLSS 5 impacts general gameplay performance than trying to simulate the same player dribbling down a court or something, because you’re not going to replicate that exact test yourself.
When you use the full suite of Nvidia’s frame gen tricks alongside DLSS 5, performance is absolutely fine. I was testing the game out at max settings, in 4K, with ray tracing and dynamic multi-frame generation switched on, and it played great. I didn’t notice any ghosting or floaty latency, although I did sometimes notice occasional screen tearing, specifically over character models, not general gameplay.
I was seeing some fluctuations every now and again; the frame rate wasn’t exactly super stable, but in a quickplay match between the New York Knicks and LA Lakers, I was seeing pretty frequent periods of the frame rate resting at 222fps and then jumping up to a peak of 238fps. Very playable, and that was when DLSS 5 was toggled on and off while I was using Multi-Frame Gen.
The issues started arriving when I didn’t rely on frame generation.
What really doesn’t work: Performance without MFG on
Using the same in-game video settings, simulating the same match, and playing for the same amount of time, I saw some pretty striking performance impacts. It seems as though Nvidia has been leaning on its multi-frame gen tools for DLSS 5, because without it on, my frame rate (on an RTX 5080) was down to between 49-55fps. Try as I might, I couldn’t get it to peak at a passable 60fps with DLSS 5 switched on. That’s a massive performance cut, especially when using the same settings and toggling DLSS 5 off meant I was playing at a super-comfortable 150-165fps.
Again, I feel it must be said that DLSS 5 should have just been called something else entirely. The entire goal of DLSS has always been to improve your frame rates, and yet it’s very clear at launch that DLSS 5 is, in fact, very demanding on your gaming PC’s performance.
If I’m really honest, even putting my disdain for generative AI to the side, the bump in visual fidelity that DLSS 5 gives you during fast-paced basketball gameplay is not worth the huge loss of frames per second.
I have no doubt Nvidia will only improve performance as time goes on – DLSS is a constant work in progress, and the performance of all of its layers, including frame generation, is improving all the time. I’ve heard that when we originally saw DLSS 5 running at GTC, it took the power of two RTX 5090s to work, which shows how much progress has been made in just six months if that’s true. Still, I shudder to think how an RTX 5060 would handle DLSS 5 without multi-frame generation being a massive crutch.
Again, DLSS is supposed to help your gaming PC’s performance, not make it worse, so DLSS 5 just feels like it’s a completely separate entity with different goals.
What doesn’t work: The game looks great to begin with
At its best, DLSS 5 adds a layer of photorealism to the experience of playing NBA 2K27, which is certainly impressive, but the issue is that it really isn’t necessary for you to enjoy the game because the artists who created it already made it look pretty impressive on its own.
I know this could be true of playing in a higher resolution, of using ray tracing, or of upscaling to begin with because all these things really try to do is enhance your experience.
DLSS 5 feels different to all of those things though, because it’s adding a layer over what’s already impressive to try and alter it for “the better”, and it comes at the expense of your frame rate. Ray tracing is probably the closest comparison. It’s nice to have, but while it carries a massive performance penalty, I likely won’t be using it because I can very easily enjoy games without it.
Like any sports sim, NBA 2K27 can sometimes be guilty of having slightly goofy face models, lifeless-looking crowd NPCs, or only minorly detailed arena environments, but playing the game without DLSS 5 isn’t going to make these things deal breakers. If that were the case, these games wouldn’t keep selling year on year.
What’s more, these are the things we never really look at, which is why developers don’t put all that much time into making them look good in the first place.
NBA 2K27, and in many ways, all of the “photoreal” games DLSS 5 will target already look plenty impressive on their own these days. DLSS 5 might be an optional thing for us to use if we want it, but I personally enjoy seeing the developers’ hard-fought efforts to make these things look real, rather than an AI model they’ve tuned to do it for them. Even if the game devs have had a hand in guiding DLSS 5, it’s not something the game needs to look good, or even be deemed visually impressive.
For every moment I think, “wow, DLSS 5 has made that look really good,” I also have one or two moments where I think, “ugh, that looks like generative AI, and it’s distracting me from the basketball game”.
What I never once thought while playing was, “It doesn’t look like that basketball player is actually holding the ball because the light on his fingers isn’t reacting accurately”. I never thought, “I’d enjoy this basketball game a lot more if the faces of the players were exactly how they look on TV.”
I certainly never thought, “I need to turn DLSS 5 back on to appreciate this game more than I do without it”.
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