NBA 2K27 gives DLSS 5 a more faithful-looking game debut than feared, provided it’s running on the LeBron of GPUs

Nvidia's latest AI rendering tool, DLSS 5, has made its live game debut in the sports title NBA 2K27. Following months of anticipation and concern regarding AI-driven rendering, early testing indicates that the implementation is surprisingly inoffensive in the visual department, avoiding the major rendering errors and stylistic distortion seen in pre-release previews. Because NBA 2K27 already targets photorealism—depicting varnished court floors and face-scanned athletes—the application of DLSS 5 results in subtle additions like slightly sweatier skin or more textured vests rather than completely breaking the original artistic intent.

Testing on RTX 50 series graphics cards, including an RTX 5080 at 1440p and an RTX 5050 at 1080p with Ultra settings and ray-traced reflections enabled, showed that facial structures remained unchanged and darker skin tones were not uncomfortably lightened. Observers noted that developers Visual Concepts likely utilized DLSS 5's masking feature to apply neural rendering selectively to objects rather than blanketing the entire image. However, this visual restraint comes at an enormous cost to performance. The RTX 5080 lost 54% of its framerate, dropping from an average of 211fps down to 98fps, while the RTX 5050 suffered a 67% performance tax, plummeting from 137fps to 44fps with DLSS 5 enabled.

While NBA 2K27 supports DLSS 4’s Multi-Frame Generation (MFG) to help recoup lost framerates, testing showed that higher modes like 3x and 6x introduced familiar frame-generation artifacts, such as distorted player ID tags, disintegrating hands, and edge distortions. Nvidia is reportedly working to improve DLSS 5 performance on 50 series cards before eventually expanding support to RTX 40 series hardware. Ultimately, while DLSS 5 successfully maintains the look of NBA 2K27 without descending into total visual distortion, its massive performance demand currently keeps it out of reach for most PC setups.