NVIDIA Counts Generated Frames in Its First DLSS 5 Benchmarks

NVIDIA's first DLSS 5 charts show output frame rates, and the render rates behind them are a lot lower. The Game Ready driver it needs also has a flicker bug in testing.

Saya4 minute readDrivers & Software

NVIDIA has put a date on DLSS 5: September 3, in NBA 2K27, on GeForce RTX 50 hardware and nothing older. The launch arrives with the company's first performance charts for an official integration, where the numbers that matter are the ones the footnotes imply rather than the ones printed on the bars. A new Game Ready driver is required that day, which matters more than usual because the current one has a display regression.

DLSS 5 switches on at 9 PM Pacific, RTX 50 only

NBA 2K27 exposes the feature as a separate "DLSS Neural Rendering" option, toggleable during gameplay and replays with F9, and support covers every GeForce RTX 50 desktop and laptop GPU plus GeForce NOW Ultimate members streaming from RTX 5080 rigs, per VideoCardz on the launch details. NVIDIA's launch material says nothing at all about RTX 40 or earlier, the question two weeks of back-porting work has left open.

The model has moved a long way since March, when the demo needed two RTX 5090s. NVIDIA says pipeline and model optimizations have made it roughly five times faster in six months, which is what brought it down to a single GPU and across the whole RTX 50 line, with more planned for the fall.

None of that makes it an upscaler. DLSS 5 is a pixel-space diffusion transformer that runs after a conventional frame is rendered and alters lighting and material response: subsurface scattering in skin, light through hair and foliage, contact shadows, the behavior of cloth and metal, as Guru3D sets out in its technical preview. Working at output resolution rather than a compressed latent space costs far more compute but keeps control over which pixels may change, so geometry, silhouettes and composition survive. At runtime it takes only the finished frame and motion vectors, which is much less engine integration than Ray Reconstruction needs and explains why modders got the leaked runtime working in games it was never built for.

The charts show output frame rates, not render rates

At 4K with the Ultra preset and ray tracing, NVIDIA shows an RTX 5090 at 370 FPS and an RTX 5080 at 233. The footnotes put DLSS Super Resolution in Performance mode with Multi Frame Generation at 6X, so the render rates underneath work out to roughly 62 and 39 FPS respectively, which TechSpot walks through from the slides. No card below the 5080 appears at 4K at all.

Lower resolutions get more of the stack. At 1440p with Quality upscaling the implied render rates land near 100 FPS on the RTX 5090, 69 on the 5080, 59 on the 5070 Ti and 44 on the 5070. At 1080p, still Quality, the same arithmetic gives about 133, 100, 88, 64, 54 and 43 FPS from the 5090 down to the 5060.

Multi Frame Generation multiplies the displayed frame rate; it does not multiply the render rate that input latency and animation sampling depend on, so a 39 FPS base on an RTX 5080 at 4K is what a player actually feels. NVIDIA has published no isolated on-versus-off comparison at matched settings, which leaves the cost of Neural Rendering itself unmeasured; VideoCardz reads the material as a 50 to 60 percent hit, and without a matched run that figure cannot be checked either. Tom's Hardware flags the same gap: first-party numbers, one game, nobody outside NVIDIA has reproduced them.

616.56 flickers on 8-bit output and locks out a power-limit tool

Game Ready 616.56 WHQL, out since August 26, produces flickering, brief black flashes and brightness shifts on monitors running 8 bits per channel, on the Windows desktop and inside Chromium applications as much as in games, with reports across GTX 16, RTX 30, RTX 40 and RTX 50 cards, as Guru3D summarizes the reports. Switching the display to 10 bpc in the NVIDIA app or Control Panel stops it in most cases and Windows Automatic Color Management has worked for some, while a clean reinstall does not. Panels that cannot take 10-bit at their current resolution and refresh rate are left with a lower refresh rate or a rollback to 610.88. NVIDIA has acknowledged the reports and says a fix is in testing with no date attached, so the September 3 driver is the obvious candidate rather than a promise.

The same driver generation also shut out mVolt+, the open-source tool that had been raising RTX 50 core power limits past anything a BIOS allows: an ROG Astra RTX 5080 reached 680W against a 450W OC BIOS ceiling, and an RTX 5090 drew 650 to 700W in games. Adjusting the core power limit now blanks out as though the driver had crashed, Tom's Hardware reports. That report cites driver 615.56 while the shipping Game Ready package is 616.56, so which build did it is unsettled, and other extreme overclocking utilities reportedly still accept power limit changes, which points at a compatibility break rather than a deliberate lockout. NVIDIA has said nothing either way.

Anyone on an 8-bit panel who updated on August 26 has a cheap first test: set 10 bpc and see whether the flicker stops before reaching for a rollback. For DLSS 5, the measurement worth waiting for is a matched on-versus-off run at fixed settings with frame generation disabled, because that is the comparison NVIDIA has not published and the only one that says what the feature costs.

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