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DLSS 5 Leak Gives Modders an Early Look at Neural Rendering
NVIDIA is still months away from officially releasing DLSS 5, but an unfinished version of its controversial Neural Rendering technology is already being pushed into games that were never designed to support it.
The discovery began inside NBA 2K27, where an unusual 158MB file named nvngx_dlssnr.dll was found in the game’s PC Early Access build.
According to VideoCardz, the library identifies itself as NVIDIA DLSSNR version 310.8.0.0 and appears to contain the runtime required for DLSS 5 Neural Rendering. NBA 2K27 itself does not currently expose controls for the feature, but that did not stop the modding community.
Control Became One of the First DLSS 5 Experiments
Members of the RenoDX community managed to get the leaked runtime working in Control within hours of its discovery. Initial tests apply Neural Rendering primarily to character models, with several different visual styles available. The difference can be dramatic, particularly on the face of protagonist Jesse Faden.
Some examples add finer skin and lighting detail, but others substantially change her appearance, reviving many of the same concerns that followed NVIDIA’s original DLSS 5 demonstrations.
That distinction matters because this is not an official Remedy implementation. The current mod effectively forces an unfinished Neural Rendering model into Control, without the scene-by-scene artistic controls that NVIDIA intends for developers.
NVIDIA says the finished technology will let studios adjust intensity, colour grading and masking, including deciding exactly which objects or scenes Neural Rendering should affect.
Experimental DLSS 5 Comes With a Huge Performance Cost
Image quality is only one of the problems with the current implementation. RenoDX contributor speedlemur reported an almost 50% performance drop when running the technology on an RTX 5070 Ti at 4 K resolution. The experimental implementation also currently has HDR issues.
Testing in Cyberpunk 2077 produced similarly brutal results. VideoCardz reports an RTX 5070 dropping from 138fps to 68fps at 1440p in rasterised rendering, while path tracing fell from 71fps to 45fps.
Those numbers should not be treated as representative of the finished DLSS 5. Modders are inserting the technology into rendering pipelines without official developer integration, and the Neural Rendering pass itself may be running at an inefficient point in those pipelines.
Modders Are Already Putting DLSS 5 Into Everything
The experiment has expanded rapidly. Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2, The Last of Us Part II Remastered, Hogwarts Legacy, Black Myth: Wukong, Grand Theft Auto V, Starfield, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater, Monster Hunter Wilds and Silent Hill 2 are among the games that have already received community tests.
The leaked library was initially restricted to RTX 50 Series hardware because parts of it were compiled specifically for Blackwell GPUs, but modders have now patched it to run on RTX 4080 and RTX 4090 cards as well. Again, performance takes a substantial hit.
None of this changes NVIDIA’s official plans. DLSS 5 remains scheduled for this fall, with confirmed developer support from companies including Capcom, Bethesda, Ubisoft, S-GAME and Warner Bros. Games.
If anything, these unofficial experiments demonstrate why those developer controls may prove so important. DLSS 5 can make a striking visual difference, but letting an AI model freely reinterpret faces, lighting and materials is very different from having artists decide exactly where those changes belong.
