DLSS 5 off and on in NBA 2K27: NVIDIA’s 3D-Guided Neural Rendering adds skin subsurface scattering and tighter contact shadows while leaving facial geometry untouched.
Nvidia is switching on DLSS 5 on September 3 at 9pm Pacific Time, and the first game to use it is NBA 2K27. The feature works on every GeForce RTX 50 Series desktop and laptop GPU, and on GeForce NOW Ultimate, where sessions run on cloud rigs powered by RTX 5080 cards. What DLSS 5 does is different from what the last few versions did. Integration runs through Nvidia Streamline or an Unreal Engine 5 plugin. At 4K Ultra with ray tracing, an RTX 5090 reaches up to 370fps. At 1440p the RTX 5070 manages 260fps.
Senior producer Peter Kavic said the technology brought “a real jump to photorealism across the game”. Nvidia says it cut the cost fivefold in six months, from two 5090s to one card, with more optimisation due in the fall. A new Game Ready Driver lands the same night, and without it the toggle stays hidden. Super Resolution and Multi Frame Generation were about speed, reconstructing or multiplying pixels so frame rates climbed. 3D-Guided Neural Rendering instead puts back the detail studios normally strip out to stay real-time. It reads the engine’s finished frame along with its motion vectors, then adds light scattering under skin, transmission through hair and foliage, tighter contact shadows and richer global illumination. Facial geometry and proportions stay exactly as the artists built them. Visual Concepts scans real athletes, so faces are the hardest thing to touch without breaking. On Cade Cunningham, arena lighting now warms the skin properly and shadows sit closer along the jersey collar. Tyrese Haliburton picks up cleaner shadow definition under the nose and across his compression sleeve. Developers get model choices plus Structure and Tone Intensity sliders, and semantic masking so the effect can be pushed on environments while characters are left alone. For players it is one on-off switch, with F9 flipping it mid-game. Performance holds up. Get the latest technology news and updates. Download the TOI App.