Nvidia: DLSS 5 Is Coming to RTX 4000 GPUs, Too

Good news for owners of RTX 4000 GPUs: You're getting access to Nvidia's DLSS 5 tech too, no mod required. 

DLSS 5 was initially announced as exclusive to the current-generation RTX 5000 GPUs. But on Thursday, Nvidia surprised gamers by announcing in a forum post that it's bringing the photorealistic effects to the preceding RTX 4000 line. 

"DLSS 5 is our most computationally demanding model to date," the company wrote. "Since we initially announced it in March, we've achieved a 5X performance gain, and there's more to come. Our current focus is on optimizing performance for the GeForce RTX 50 Series, with model updates expected later this fall. Once RTX 50 Series performance is more fully tuned, we plan to work on expanding official support to the GeForce RTX 40 Series."

Unfortunately, no timeline was given. For now, DLSS 5 is only available on NBA 2K27, but Nvidia says teams are working to integrate the graphics technology into other games, too.

DLSS 5 has been making waves for its ability to add photorealistic effects to PC games , although some critics have derided the tech as AI slop. Whatever your opinion, the AI-driven feature hogs GPU resources and can lead to a 50% to 60% hit on frame rates. We found this in our own testing of NBA 2K27 with DLSS 5 on , with the frame rates falling to around 70fps, down from 140, despite running on an RTX 5090 card.

However, Nvidia's forum post suggests it sees room to optimize DLSS 5 for better performance not only for the RTX 5000 series but also for the preceding generation. The company announced the news after some Reddit posts  complained that Nvidia was "artificially locking" DLSS 5 to the RTX 5000 series.

In the meantime, the gaming modding community has already found unofficial ways to get DLSS 5 running on RTX 4000 GPUs in select games, such as Cyberpunk 2077. But again, you can expect a 60% drop in FPS.

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