I've swapped in NVIDIA's new October DLSS 5 update model on RTX Spark, and it's 25% faster at 1440p.

The performance gain from enabling DLSS Neural Rendering has dropped considerably, but NBA 2K27 still isn't convincing anyone.

The performance you get from enabling DLSS Neural Rendering is now significantly lower, but NBA 2K27 still won't convince anyone.

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Pumpkin Month is here and so is PC technology. Along with the launch of the new Nvidia RTX Spark platform — which brings us Nvidia-powered laptops and mini PCs at a very affordable price — we've now also received the latest update to DLSS 5, or DLSS Neural Rendering, or DLSS NR. I'm still not 100% sure how we should refer to this, but I'm certainly not convinced by the whole "3D-guided neural rendering" moniker.

Anyway, we have a new model to play in a game that has been officially released with the technology inside: NBA 2K27. And almost certainly from here on out on any of the countless modding platforms that have built DLSS 5 into every game you can imagine, on every GPU architecture.

The new model hopes to require half as much hardware as the previous model—so 30 percent instead of 60 percent—and Nvidia says it did this by refining the training data and reducing the model size to about 118 million parameters, making it roughly 24 percent smaller. In terms of the impact it has on your GPU's VRAM, Nvidia cites a 20% reduction in VRAM usage at 4K.

NBA 2K27 running on Nvidia RTX Spark with DLSS October 5 update

Which is fine for Nvidia's numbers, but what happens in the real world? I have the preview version of the .dll files, made specifically for the RTX Spark hardware I'm testing (probably so we can't put the files somewhere and reveal the new model early), and I've been playing NBA 2K27 on the Asus ProArt P16 once again.

Testing the new DLSS 5 model in NBA 2K27. Using DLSS Balanced and 4x Multi Frame Gen.

NBA 2K27 (1080p High) NBA 2K27 (1440p High)

And frankly, the results are pretty impressive. First, I can run this RTX Spark at over 200fps anyway, but also at 1080p it's still around 170fps with DLSS 5 enabled.

Hogwarts Legacy's DLSS 5 update shows that the developers are listening to PC gamers to keep it away from the game's characters.

I've found that DLSS 5 can drop frame rates by up to 73% on RTX 5080 gaming PCs in NBA 2K27, and I don't know what kind of mega-rig can justify the performance hit.

DLSS 5 is called "DLSS Neural Rendering" in NBA 2K27's graphics options, and I think I sense a rebranding of Nvidia's controversial graphics technology.

Looking at the more compressed 1440p result, you can see what a big hit the original model gave to gaming when DLSS 5 and Neural Rendering were enabled. Dropping from a healthy 200fps to half that is brutal, a performance no one will be happy with.

Especially when, let's be honest, the extra lighting and tonal improvements are only noticeable during the game's many cutscenes. As you can see in the video above, when you zoom out, you're actually playing the game, the extra fidelity doesn't really add much to the experience.

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Showing the difference between DLSS 5 off and on with the new October update model.

It's still down from 200fps to 134fps - a 33% drop in performance - but that's in line with what Nvidia has suggested for this updated model. And when you're still getting that kind of framerate at 1440p on a relatively thin and light laptop (it also has an Arm CPU), I'll admit to being impressed by the technical achievements here.

Of course we're running all the Nvidia bells and stuff here, so I've got 4x MFG enabled and I'm running DLSS super resolution in balanced mode, but I can still say that the movement on the small screen of this Asus ProArt P16 looks great.

I really didn't before I disabled VSync though. When I first booted the game, this was enabled by default, and despite the OLED panel's 120Hz refresh rate, it dragged performance down to 60fps. And, oh boy, was Frame General Artifact. When I disabled it and the framerate went up, everything went away, but it sure wasn't pretty...

But while it's currently a showcase for DLSS Neural Rendering, NBA 2K27 isn't exactly a game that can showcase the technology at its best. Sure, it has a lot of cutscenes, but for the most part you're watching the game from above, where the extra lighting niceties aren't a big deal. So why do you actually turn it on?

At least for now, when it shows up in new games – and when this updated model makes its way into the DLSS 5 modding tools – it won't have the kind of performance you've been challenging it before. But there has to be some kind of positive "wow" moment for this feature.

Fingers crossed they can push the model further to reduce performance even further, and fingers crossed for some of the programmers involved to build something impressive.

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Dave has been playing on the Colecovision and Commodore Vic 20 codebook since Zaxxon and Lady Bug (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming computer at the age of 16 and finally finished debugging a Cyrix-based system about a year later. When he threw it out of the window. He first began writing decades ago for the official PlayStation and Xbox World magazines, then moved full-time to PC Format, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3, among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmare market for graphics cards, processors with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs bigger than a Cybertruck.

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