The first unofficial implementations of NVIDIA DLSS 5 have emerged ahead of its autumn release. Previously, an early version of NBA 2K27 included a previously unknown library file, nvngx_dlssnr.dll. This 158 MB file was identified as NVIDIA DLSSNR version 310.8.0.0 and contained the DLSS 5 neural rendering runtime. At the time, there were no known methods to use it elsewhere beyond NVIDIA's planned implementation.
However, this situation did not last long. Members of the RenoDX mod community have successfully gotten this new library running in Control. The most直观 demonstration applies neural rendering to the protagonist Jesse's character model and allows users to switch between various control options. According to the mod developer, seven different styles are available, although the current implementation in this test only affects the character model.
Nevertheless, this remains an experimental implementation of DLSS 5. There are several reasons not to consider it a mature DLSS 5 mod. The implementation has not yet been added to RenoDX's public release. Additionally, HDR is currently not functioning correctly: current tests are focused on SDR, and developers are investigating how the new model handles the image data provided to it.
What makes this experiment interesting is that the model appears to require very little data. According to RenoDX member speedlemur, the current implementation seems to use the same input data already available for standard DLSS Super Resolution. However, the neural rendering pass is currently executed late in the pipeline—after super resolution, and possibly after tone mapping. When running at 4K resolution on an RTX 5070 Ti, the developer stated that the current implementation is practically unusable, recording a performance drop of nearly 50% in one test.
DLSS 5 is likely to become a new target for game modders. Discussions also mentioned that experimental DLSS 5 processing has been applied to A Hat in Time, a relatively old DirectX 9 game and one of the titles NVIDIA announced as supporting DLSS 5. RenoDX developers also believe that if AI neural rendering continues to use the data already provided by DLSS and Ray Reconstruction, Unreal Engine 5 games could become relatively easy targets.
Currently, these experiments only demonstrate what mod developers can extract from the DLSS NR runtime included in NBA 2K27. They do not represent the final performance of NVIDIA's official DLSS 5. NVIDIA officially plans to release DLSS 5 for GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards this fall, providing developers with controls to selectively apply AI neural rendering to scenes and individual objects.
It is also worth noting that DLSS NR runs on a single GPU. Even more intriguing is what mod developers might still unlock in the coming days, or more likely, in the coming hours.