NVIDIA has not released DLSS 5, but its runtime is already on people's drives: a neural rendering library shipped inside an early access basketball game, and a modding community had it drawing on Control's characters a few hours later. The early look is worth reading carefully, because the mod runs the model through a pipeline it was never integrated into.
The DLSS 5 runtime shipped inside a basketball game
NBA 2K27's PC early access build carries nvngx_dlssnr.dll, a 158 MB file Windows identifies as NVIDIA DLSSNR version 310.8.0.0, found by Renan Maniero and reported by VideoCardz. That is roughly three times the size of the larger DLSS 4 Super Resolution DLLs, which usually land between 20 and 50 MB, and nobody has explained what the extra data holds. The game exposes no Neural Rendering setting and NVIDIA has not named it as a DLSS 5 title, so this is a shipping artifact rather than a feature waiting to be switched on. Hidden DLSS-NR entries appeared in GeForce driver 610.47 back in May with nothing to point them at; this is the first runtime anyone outside NVIDIA could actually load.
RenoDX contributors had it running in Control within hours, applying Neural Rendering to Jesse's character model with seven selectable styles, per VideoCardz on the mod. The caveats matter more than the screenshots: the work is not in a public RenoDX release, HDR is misbehaving so testing is SDR only, the pass currently runs late in the pipeline after upscaling and possibly after tone mapping, and on an RTX 5070 Ti at 4K one developer measured an almost 50 percent frame rate loss and called it effectively unusable. That number describes a model being fed by a pipeline it was never integrated into, not DLSS 5's cost.
The interesting part is how little the model appears to need. A RenoDX contributor reports it running on the same inputs regular DLSS upscaling already receives, which is why a DirectX 9 game like A Hat in Time came up in the same conversation and why the group expects Unreal Engine 5 titles to be easy targets. NVIDIA still plans a fall release on RTX 50 hardware, per VideoCardz on the schedule, and the controls it demonstrated at the reveal cover intensity, color grading, and masking through the Streamline framework, as PC Gamer relayed. That makes the shipping version a deliberate per-scene tool rather than a global filter, and that is the version worth judging.