DLSS 5 promises to transform game rendering thanks to Neural Rendering, but initial tests reveal an unexpected trade-off: enabling the technology causes power consumption to skyrocket.
With a maximum power draw of 575 W, the GeForce RTX 5090 was already far from being a particularly power-efficient graphics card. DLSS 5, however, seems determined to push the limits even further. In the first tests of NVIDIA’s Neural Rendering published by Tom’s Hardware and reported by VideoCardz, the RTX 5090 Founders Edition consistently hit its power limit, while a much more powerful MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z climbed as high as 802 W. The latter is obviously not quite like other RTX 5090s. Its two 12V-2×6 connectors and Extreme BIOS give it a power budget of up to 1,000 W—a margin that, above all, gives an idea of how much power the new neural processing can consume when the GPU is no longer limited.
Tests conducted by Tom’s Hardware on the game *Control* using an RTX 5090 © Tom’s Hardware
The observed differences are particularly impressive. In Cyberpunk 2077, the RTX 5090 Founders Edition goes from 482 to 551 W with DLSS 5, while the Lightning Z climbs from 580 to 723 W. In *Hogwarts Legacy*, the MSI card jumps from 480 to 720 W: an additional 240 W, representing a 50% increase. And *Control* takes the cake with 802 W on the Lightning Z, compared to 691 W without Neural Rendering. Moreover, this excessive power consumption does not necessarily translate to a higher frame rate. In tests conducted on these games, enabling DLSS 5 actually leads to a significant drop in performance due to the power-hungry nature of NVIDIA’s technology. In Control, both RTX 5090s lose approximately 42% of their performance with Neural Rendering enabled. However, we should avoid immediately treating these figures as a general rule. These initial tests were conducted using a community-developed implementation of the DLSS 5 model prior to its official release, and the Lightning Z has power capabilities that are vastly different from those of a standard RTX 5090. The 800 W figure is therefore not a new “normal” power draw for the 5090, but rather a spectacular demonstration of what happens when the GPU has enough headroom to let Neural Rendering run at full capacity.
Power tests conducted by HardwareLUXX on NBA 2K27 and the final version of DLSS 5 © HardwareLUXX
It would ultimately be quite easy to dismiss this as just another instance of the most powerful graphics card in the lineup going overboard. Except that the initial readings published by HardwareLUXX seem to confirm the information from Tom’s Hardware. They show that the phenomenon extends much further down the Blackwell lineup. The RTX 5080 is also affected, with power consumption that can increase by about 100 watts when DLSS 5 kicks in, reaching its 360 W limit. Measurements taken using NBA 2K27 reveal, above all, that this phenomenon affects several generations of cards in the RTX 50 series. An RTX 5070, for example, goes from 147 W in Full HD and 206 W in QHD to about 250 W with DLSS 5 in Quality mode. The RTX 5070 Ti, meanwhile, ranges from 192 to 261 W depending on the resolution, before reaching approximately 300 W with neural rendering. The RTX 5080 is no exception to this trend: under test conditions, its power consumption rises from 291 to 349 W. And the RTX 5090 is, of course, the most dramatic, with an increase from 374 to 575 W in this same comparison. In other words, DLSS 5 isn’t just an energy-hungry curiosity reserved for the top of the lineup: Neural Rendering appears to have a measurable power cost across all the GeForce RTX 50 models tested.
Power tests conducted by HardwareLUXX on NBA 2K27 and the final version of DLSS 5 © HardwareLUXX
This change is far from trivial. Until now, enabling DLSS was generally associated with an improvement in the trade-off between image quality and performance. The very principle of reconstruction involves calculating an image at a lower internal resolution and then reconstructing it using artificial intelligence. With DLSS 5, however, NVIDIA is adding a much more ambitious layer of neural rendering, which places greater demands on the GPU’s specialized computing capabilities. The issue, therefore, becomes less about a graphics card’s maximum power consumption and more about the ratio between the watts consumed and the actual benefit gained. Naturally, we’ll have to wait for more games and tests with the official versions of DLSS 5 before drawing definitive conclusions, but the warning is clear.
