NVIDIA recently announced that the latest generation of DLSS 5 technology will officially launch on September 4th, with the debut game being "NBA 2K27",Currently only supports RTX 50 series graphics cards.
Ever since its announcement earlier this year, controversy has never ceased. Gamers are strongly opposed to DLSS 5 because this generation improves game performance using AI generation, which is different from previous DLSS versions. Players worry that it will replace traditional game rendering, leading developers to stop putting effort into design and instead rely on AI to automatically generate game visuals.
To appease players, NVIDIA even brought out Jensen Huang himself,emphasizing that DLSS 5 will not drastically alter game visuals; players will still see the carefully designed scenes created by developers.
So, why is NVIDIA pushing forward with DLSS 5 despite so much opposition? Edward Liu, the NVIDIA executive in charge of the project, provided an explanation, statingVRAM and computing power simultaneously limit the complexity of game scenes and the affordable number of light rays. Previous DLSS technologies were based on reconstructing these elements, but even the most perfect reconstruction is limited by the content contained within the scene.
DLSS 5 is the first DLSS technology to surpass the traditional rendering abstraction layer and break through this ceiling, but it is also rooted in the gaming world, controlled by artists.
How should we interpret NVIDIA's stance? Simply put, they believe that with technological advancements, if we want to further improve game graphics and ray tracing, current VRAM and GPU performance are insufficient. Especially considering the significant price increases in memory over the past few years, the cost of high-capacity VRAM has become astronomical. It's hard to imagine next-generation graphics cards featuring 64GB or even 128GB of VRAM.
NVIDIA developed DLSS 5 to solve this problem. Since we can't expect hardware performance and VRAM capacity to increase significantly, they are approaching it from a software perspective, using AI to generate game visuals, similar to how large models generate images.
The actual results are quite evident. NVIDIA mentioned a statistic in their DLSS 5 research paper:DLSS 5 generates 4K resolution game frames in just 8ms, equivalent to 125 FPS, with peak VRAM usage of only 731MB.
As for image quality, NVIDIA also compared the image generation quality of two large models, GPT Image2 and Gemini 3 Pro, stating that DLSS 5's image quality surpasses these large models as well.
This leads to the game performance showcase mentioned above. In NBA 2K27, the frame rates for RTX 50 series graphics cards have truly skyrocketed, with the RTX 5060 reaching 258 FPS, even with ray tracing and Ultra settings enabled.
However, NVIDIA cleverly used 1080p resolution here, so it's unclear what the specific performance will be at 4K. We'll have to wait for subsequent real-world tests.
Considering the development of AI technology, DLSS 5 still has great potential to further improve performance. Performance has already increased fivefold in the past few months, and subsequent optimizations are expected to deliver even smoother performance.