Nvidia confirmed on Thursday that its DLSS 5 neural rendering technology will eventually come to GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs, reversing an earlier position that limited the feature to RTX 50 series cards.
The announcement came after modders had already gotten DLSS 5 working on RTX 40 hardware using leaked DLL files, sparking a backlash against the exclusivity decision. Nvidia said in a statement to The Verge and WCCFTech that RTX 40 support will follow once the company finishes optimizing performance for the newer cards.
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.
The statement confirms what modders had already demonstrated: DLSS 5 runs on RTX 40 hardware without catastrophic performance penalties. When a modding community extracts a feature from leaked files and gets it working on hardware the manufacturer says cannot support it, the marketing argument for exclusivity becomes difficult to sustain.
The reversal echoes AMD’s FSR 4 controversy
The situation mirrors a similar backlash AMD faced earlier this year. When modders got FSR 4 working on pre-RDNA 4 graphics cards, AMD faced intense criticism for limiting its AI upscaler to the newer RX 9000 series. AMD eventually brought FSR 4 to its older RX 7000 series with FSR 4.1, and has promised RX 6000 support next year.
Nvidia’s reversal suggests the company learned from AMD’s experience. When modders can demonstrate that a feature works on older hardware with acceptable performance, maintaining exclusivity becomes hard to justify to consumers who spent hundreds of dollars on RTX 40 cards just two years ago. The modding community’s work on DLSS 5 effectively proved that the performance gap between RTX 40 and RTX 50 for this workload was not as large as Nvidia initially implied.
The parallel is not exact, however. AMD’s FSR 4 backlash was louder because the performance gap between RDNA 3 and RDNA 4 hardware was smaller, making the exclusivity decision feel purely like a sales tactic. Nvidia’s situation is different: DLSS 5 is genuinely more demanding, and the RTX 50 series has tensor cores specifically designed for neural rendering workloads. The company has a legitimate technical argument for prioritizing RTX 50 optimization first. The problem is that modders undercut that argument by showing the feature works on RTX 40 at all.
How DLSS 5 works and why it matters
Unlike earlier DLSS versions that focused on upscaling and frame generation to boost performance, DLSS 5 is about visual fidelity. The technology uses neural rendering to reconstruct game imagery at a level of detail that traditional rendering techniques cannot match. The tradeoff is performance: DLSS 5 currently runs roughly five times slower than its March unveiling, though Nvidia has been working to close that gap.
Nvidia’s own charts show the company expects to reach 7.5x its original DLSS 5 performance eventually. That would put the final version about 50% faster than what shipped in the initial September 3 release alongside NBA 2K27. The performance trajectory matters because DLSS 5 in its current state cuts frame rates substantially, a penalty many gamers are unwilling to accept even for improved visuals.
For RTX 40 owners, the performance impact is the key concern. The RTX 50 series has more powerful tensor cores designed specifically for neural rendering workloads. Running DLSS 5 on older hardware will likely mean a larger performance hit, which is why Nvidia is waiting to optimize the RTX 50 experience first before expanding to the previous generation. The company’s language suggests it views this as a sequencing issue rather than a capability one.
The difference between the two GPU generations matters in practice. An RTX 5090 running DLSS 5 might lose 15% of its frame rate, while an RTX 4090 could lose 25% or more. Those are rough estimates based on the modding community’s early tests, but they illustrate why Nvidia wants to optimize the feature before making it official on older hardware.
The gaming launch
DLSS 5 launched officially on September 3 through a Game Ready driver for NBA 2K27, 2K Games’ latest basketball simulation. The feature is supported on all RTX 50 series GPUs, RTX 50 laptops, and GeForce NOW cloud gaming. No other games have announced DLSS 5 support yet, though the technology will likely expand as developers integrate the SDK over the coming months.
The RTX 40 version is expected to arrive in late 2026 or early 2027, after Nvidia completes its optimization pass on the RTX 50 series. The company did not provide a specific date, but the language suggests it views the RTX 40 release as a near-term priority rather than a distant promise.
For now, RTX 40 owners can watch modders demonstrate what the hardware can do while waiting for the official release. The modding community’s ability to extract DLSS 5 from leaked files has effectively forced Nvidia’s hand, turning what could have been a generation-exclusive feature into a cross-generational one. The question is whether the optimized version arrives fast enough to satisfy a user base that has already seen what the technology can do on their cards.
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