Nvidia DLSS 5 Coming to RTX 4000 GPUs After Achieving 5X Performance Gains on RTX 50 Series

Nvidia: DLSS 5 Is Coming to RTX 4000 GPUs, Too

Good news for owners of RTX 4000 GPUs: You're getting access to Nvidia's DLSS 5 tech too, no mod required. DLSS 5 was initially announced as exclusive to the current-generation RTX 5000 GPUs. But on Thursday, Nvidia surprised gamers by announcing in a forum post that it's bringing the photorealistic effects to the preceding RTX 4000 line. "DLSS 5 is our most computationally demanding model to date," the company wrote. "Since we initially announced it in March, we've achieved a 5X performance gain, and there's more to come. Our current focus is on optimizing performance for the GeForce RTX 50 Series, with model updates expected later this fall. Once RTX 50 Series performance is more fully tuned, we plan to work on expanding official support to the GeForce RTX 40 Series." Unfortunately, no timeline was given. For now, DLSS 5 is only available on NBA 2K27, but Nvidia says teams are working to integrate the graphics technology into other games, too. DLSS 5 has been making waves for its ability to add photorealistic effects to PC games, although some critics have derided the tech as AI slop. Whatever your opinion, the AI-driven feature hogs GPU resources and can lead to a 50% to 60% hit on frame rates. We found this in our own testing of NBA 2K27 with DLSS 5 on, with the frame rates falling to around 70fps, down from 140, despite running on an RTX 5090 card. However, Nvidia's forum post suggests it sees room to optimize DLSS 5 for better performance not only for the RTX 5000 series but also for the preceding generation. The company announced the news after some Reddit posts complained that Nvidia was "artificially locking" DLSS 5 to the RTX 5000 series. In the meantime, the gaming modding community has already found unofficial ways to get DLSS 5 running on RTX 4000 GPUs in select games, such as Cyberpunk 2077. But again, you can expect a 60% drop in FPS.

NVIDIA Confirms DLSS 5 Support Extends To RTX 40 GPUs, But First Focusing On Model Optimization on RTX 50 Series

NVIDIA DLSS 5 is going to be released on older RTX 40 GPUs and will be available once the model is fully tuned on RTX 50 series. NVIDIA RTX 40 GPUs Will Get DLSS 5 Support As Model Optimization Continues on RTX 50 Series This week, NVIDIA finally launches its DLSS 5 technology, with NBA 2K27 being the first game to offer support for 3D-Guided Neural Rendering. While the initial support is aimed at RTX 50 GPUs based on the Blackwell architecture, NVIDIA is confirming that they plan to extend support to RTX 40 GPUs too, based on the Ada Lovelace architecture. DLSS 5 is our most computationally demanding model to date. Since we initially announced it in March, we've achieved a 5X performance gain and there's more to come. Our current focus is on optimizing performance for the GeForce RTX 50 Series with model updates expected later this fall. Once RTX 50 Series performance is more fully tuned, we plan to work on expanding official support to the GeForce RTX 40 Series. NVIDIA PR to Wccftech The announcement means that more gamers will be able to take advantage of game-changing visuals with DLSS 5 as showcased a few days ago. NVIDIA isn't giving us an exact date for DLSS 5 support on RTX 40 GPUs yet, but they have provided an indication of when that will be possible. You see, NVIDIA's DLSS 5 is their most demanding AI model to date. The original demo was run on dual RTX 5090 graphics cards, but the company managed to improve the model by 50% within two months, managing to run it on just one RTX 5090. In July, NVIDIA got the DLSS 5 model to improve by almost 2.5x, and finally, in August, the model improved by 5x and is able to run across all RTX 50 graphics cards. NVIDIA explained that the improvement to the DLSS 5 model is a combination of basic hardware, software kernel, and co-design optimizations. The model is smaller, faster, looks more realistic, and offers more control to developers than the initial model that was presented during GTC 2026. Furthermore, NVIDIA isn't stopping here. The company says its optimizations for DLSS 5 will roll out at a much faster pace, making the model run faster and look even better. It looks like we'll be able to get another update later this year that improves the model and brings faster performance to the table. We can expect the optimizations in the coming months to improve the model's performance by 7-10x from its initial unveiling. That would result in far less impact on performance than the existing 50-60% hit on average. If the model ends up having a 10-15% impact on performance by the end of this year, that would make it possible for gamers to run it without using MFG modes such as 6x or with "Performance" mode upscaling. Since RTX 40 GPUs don't have MFG support, they need the model to get fine-tuned before it can become viable for their hardware. And that fine-tuning starts at RTX 50 GPUs, and then leads into RTX 40 GPUs. Given NVIDIA's history with model tuning, we might even see RTX 30 support down the road since GPUs down to the RTX 20 series are already supporting DLSS 5 through unofficial mods. The RTX 40 support is great news, and we can't wait to see Ada Lovelace owners enjoy the DLSS 5 goodness on their cards. Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.