DLSS 5 Leak Hits 10+ PC Games, Halves Frame Rates in Unofficial Mod Tests

Marcus Vale30/08/20265 min read

A build of NBA 2K27 shipped with a file it was never supposed to have, and PC modders have spent the last week running that file through more than a dozen games. The file is an early piece of NVIDIA’s unreleased DLSS 5 neural rendering system, and the community that dug it out, the RenoDX Discord, has now tested it in everything from Control to Cyberpunk 2077 to The Last of Us Part II Remastered. VideoCardz reports it took modders only hours to get the leaked NVIDIA DLSS 5 Neural Rendering library working in Control, with the mod spreading fast from there.

The NBA 2K27 File Nobody Was Meant to See

The early access build of NBA 2K27 includes a 158 MB DLL file named nvngx_dlssnr.dll, identified as NVIDIA DLSSNR 310.8.0.0. According to TweakTown, Renan Maniero discovered it in early access files of NBA 2K27, and it’s the first publicly accessible DLSSNR runtime found in a released game build. There’s no menu toggle for it. NBA 2K27 lacks UI toggles and NVIDIA hasn’t confirmed DLSS 5 compatibility yet.

That gap between “the file exists” and “you can turn it on” is exactly what the RenoDX crowd closed. Fans have been arguing over the leaked footage since it dropped:

Control Drops From 71 FPS to 35 With It Switched On

The first working implementation landed in Remedy’s Control, and the frame rate cost is the number everyone’s repeating. Multiple outlets, including VideoCardz and FandomWire, cite a tester who saw an RTX 5070 Ti reportedly saw performance fall from around 71 frames per second to roughly 35 FPS with the experimental implementation enabled. That’s not a minor hit. That’s roughly half.

Cyberpunk 2077 tells a similar story on an RTX 5070. At 1440p, raster performance dropped from 138 to 68 FPS after enabling DLSS 5. Ray Tracing Ultra fell from 111 to 55 FPS, while path tracing dropped from 71 to 45 FPS. Testers also flagged a VRAM quirk: the same tester reported that repeatedly toggling DLSS 5 appeared to add around 1 GB of VRAM usage each time, though that could just as easily be a bug in the RenoDX injection framework rather than the model itself.

From TLOU2 to GTA San Andreas: The Full Game List

The mod hasn’t stayed confined to one engine or one era of game. VideoCardz lists new examples including Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2, The Last of Us Part II Remastered, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, Hogwarts Legacy and Black Myth: Wukong, with community tests also appearing for Wuchang: Fallen Feathers, Starfield, Counter-Strike, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade II, GTA V, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, Monster Hunter Wilds and Silent Hill 2. GameSpot separately confirmed tests running on extensive tests on Control, Cyberpunk 2077, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and even Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, a PlayStation 2-era game none of us expected to see AI-reinterpreted skin shaders on in 2026.

The San Andreas result is the one worth sitting with if you care about how this technology treats older art direction. GameSpot notes it completely breaks down when looking at how much it alters a PlayStation 2 title, making sweeping changes to character and environmental models that just look wrong. That cuts against NVIDIA’s own framing.

NVIDIA’s “GPT Moment” Pitch vs What the Leak Shows

None of this is the finished product, and NVIDIA has been clear about the timeline. NVIDIA’s own newsroom post confirms DLSS 5, arriving this fall, introduces a real-time neural rendering model that infuses pixels with photoreal lighting and materials, and the company is calling it the company’s most significant breakthrough in computer graphics since the debut of real-time ray tracing in 2018. Support is already lined up: DLSS 5 will be supported by the industry’s biggest publishers and game developers, including Bethesda, CAPCOM, Hotta Studio, NetEase, NCSOFT, S-GAME, Tencent, Ubisoft and Warner Bros. Games. CEO Jensen Huang didn’t undersell it either: “Twenty-five years after NVIDIA invented the programmable shader, we are reinventing computer graphics once again,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “DLSS 5 is the GPT moment for graphics, blending handcrafted rendering with generative AI to deliver a dramatic leap in visual realism while preserving the control artists need for creative expression.”

Our view: that’s a big claim to make about a feature nobody outside NVIDIA has actually shipped yet, and the leaked build is doing NVIDIA no favours in the meantime. Gizmodo’s side-by-side testing landed on the same conclusion we would: watching all this gameplay and comparing side-by-side shots of games with or without “neural rendering” enabled, we haven’t come away impressed. NVIDIA has already conceded ground on the artistic-control promise, too. Nvidia later admitted that the AI model applying these visuals does not take into account much of the rendering pipeline, like the PBR (physically based rendering) that designates different types of materials to a game engine. If DLSS 5 is meant to preserve an artist’s intent rather than override it, that’s exactly the piece that’s supposed to make it work, and it’s the piece that’s currently missing.

What’s Left Before an Actual Release

NVIDIA hasn’t put a firm date on it beyond “this fall,” and one modding outlet tracking the file drops noted plainly that NVIDIA plans to release DLSS 5 by the end of 2026, and right now, we don’t have an exact ETA on when it will come out. Until then, everything circulating is an unfinished library running through a third-party injection tool, not the feature NVIDIA intends to ship. Worth remembering that before anyone declares DLSS 5 dead on arrival based on a Control test with no official settings menu behind it.