Nvidia’s latest DLSS 5 Neural Rendering can run on older RTX GPUs, but the performance hit is grim.
Multiple users claim the upcoming tech works on older RTX hardware, including GeForce RTX 30 series Ampere cards. That follows modders getting hold of a leaked DLL file and switching on DLSS 5 in games before Nvidia’s official release.
The same crowd later managed to get DLSS 5 running on RTX 40 series cards through a fairly simple CUDA binaries swap. Now X user flovreq has shown DLSS 5 Neural Rendering running on a GeForce RTX 3080 in Deep Rock Galactic.
The game dropped from 138 fps to just four fps when DLSS Neural Rendering was enabled, which was a 97 per cent performance collapse. Frame times were just as ugly, rising from about seven to eight milliseconds to around 260 milliseconds. That makes the game effectively unplayable.
The hit is far worse than the 40 to 50 per cent drop seen on RTX 50 and RTX 40 cards. RTX 30 hardware simply cannot cope with this unofficial implementation.
For now, the RTX 50 series remains the only line expected to receive DLSS 5 Neural Rendering in the autumn. Nvidia has not confirmed whether RTX 20, RTX 30 or RTX 40 cards will get the update.
