by DLSS 5 recently saw an official release with its inclusion in NBA 2K27, with the .DLL file included in the game quickly spreading to a wide range of other titles thanks to the efforts of the PC gaming community. Modders have also been working on minimising the performance impact of the incredibly expensive technology, with two notable developments worthy of coverage thus far.
The first is a mod called Neural Copressor that shifts the neural rendering work to a second GPU, while the first GPU handles the rendering. The developer, Marcelo Guibout, demonstrated The Blood of Dawnwalker running up to 127 percent faster using the tool, with a dual RTX 5060 Ti setup that has each graphics card hooked to a separate display.
The downside is that display latency also doubles, as instead of the rendered frame going directly to the display, it's then sent to the second GPU for the neural processing pass. It's a similar trade-off to frame generation in other words, so it might make sense for games where timing is less important like turn-based tactics games (Zero Company, any one?).
The second performance mod, Neural Upstream by Matias Lombo, offers a different trade-off, sacrificing some fidelity for higher frame-rates.
In short, rather than running the neural processing step near the end of the pipeline on the full-size image, Neural Upstream runs it just before DLSS upscaling takes place, allowing for a smaller computation cost and therefore higher frame-rates.
This feels like a more reasonable way of doing things if you want to actually play games with DLSS 5 enabled, rather than just messing around with what the technology can do.
Have you been experimenting with DLSS 5? Let me know in the comments below.