NVIDIA's DLSS 5 technology has officially launched alongside NBA 2K27. Currently, it primarily supports RTX 50 series graphics cards, and the number of supported games still needs to expand, which is an issue to be addressed in the future.
Since its release earlier this year, DLSS 5 has sparked considerable controversy. Concerns range from potential image distortion to fears that game developers might become lazy due to the technology. There has been extensive discussion on these topics. Recently, numerous reviews have been published both domestically and internationally. You can refer to our site's initial review—Hardware Testing for the First Game Supporting DLSS 5: "NBA 2K27".
Beyond the commonly concerned issues of performance and image quality, another point worth mentioning is that DLSS 5 technology also increases GPU power consumption. A detailed review from the German website Computerbase provides the following results:
They compared the power consumption of various graphics cards, ranging from the RTX 5060 to the RTX 5090, with DLSS 5 enabled and disabled at 2K and 4K resolutions. The results are clear at a glance.
To conclude, DLSS 5 does increase GPU power consumption. After all, the workload of DLSS 5 is not low; it's akin to the GPU running an additional local large language model. With the increased load, power consumption naturally rises in theory.
However, the exact increase in power consumption depends on the specific GPU. The power increase for the RTX 5060 is almost negligible. The RTX 5060 Ti and RTX 5070 see an increase of approximately 10%, which is still within an acceptable absolute value.
The power consumption difference for the RTX 5070 Ti is quite noticeable at 2K resolution, but narrows to around 10% at 4K.
However, the high-end RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 show a very significant increase in power consumption, with an uplift of around 60%. The increase drops noticeably at 4K resolution: the RTX 5090 sees only a 40% increase, while the RTX 5080 increases by approximately 25%.
Overall, DLSS 5 causes a more noticeable increase in power consumption for higher-performance GPUs, with a greater percentage increase at 2K resolution compared to 4K.
As for the reason behind the significant spike in power consumption, the original article didn't provide an explanation. Logically, DLSS 5 should utilize the GPU's Tensor Cores. Previous versions of DLSS didn't cause a substantial increase in power consumption, but their demands for upscaling and ray tracing reconstruction were also lower than those of DLSS 5.