30% more performance, 20% less RAM usage: DLSS 5 is making a big splash in October

NVIDIA had assured us that DLSS 5 was still in its early stages. The company seems to be keeping its promise.

Last March, we published an article on NVIDIA’s brand-new DLSS 5 technology. That article highlighted the strengths of this promising technology, but also pointed out some areas of uncertainty while engineers were still hard at work. In fact, the official release of DLSS 5 wasn’t met with nothing but praise. Of course, performance was up and the visuals—particularly in the first compatible game, NBA 2K7—were impressive, but some testers quickly noted a tendency toward excessive power consumption. This is a potential concern that NVIDIA hasn’t yet addressed, but there is still some good news.

With the October update, NVIDIA claims that gamers will be able to achieve up to 40% more performance, depending on the game, situation, and configuration. For now, NBA 2K27 continues to serve as the benchmark, as it is the only game currently available that is compatible with the new technology:  “Thanks to a combination of systematic pipeline optimizations and improvements to the neural models, the performance of DLSS 5’s 3D-Guided Neural Rendering model has doubled this week.” And the chart—which is official, let’s keep that in mind—seems to confirm this.

NVIDIA highlights the gains achieved with the latest DLSS 5 update. © NVIDIA

Next, NVIDIA discusses VRAM and notes that it has reduced DLSS 5’s “footprint by 24%, to approximately 118 million parameters, while decreasing VRAM consumption by 20% at 4K.” This could be particularly beneficial for lower-end graphics cards—we’re thinking, of course, of the 8, 10, and 12 GB models. Finally, the topic of games comes up: in addition to NBA 2K27, a DLSS 5-compatible version of Hogwarts Legacy is set to launch on November 5, while Where Winds Meet will follow suit by the end of the same month. Let’s face it—it would be great to see more games arrive sooner.