Everything below comes from one writer, one PC and a community mod that loads files Nvidia never released for these games. That is the one caveat that matters. Within that limit, the test lines up with Nvidia's own description of the technology and with what other modders have reported.
DLSS 5 Generates the Final Image Instead of Upscaling It
Earlier DLSS versions worked as reconstruction tools. In Nvidia's words, they used learned reconstruction to approximate output that would otherwise need a bigger rendering budget. The game rendered at a lower resolution and DLSS rebuilt a sharper, higher-resolution frame, so the whole point was performance.
Nvidia's research group describes DLSS 5 as something else: a real-time generative rendering stage, built on a one-step diffusion model, that adds appearance knowledge learned from real-world images. The model takes in the current rendered frame, the engine's motion vectors, some carried-over data from previous frames, and "artistic-direction" values. Nvidia calls DLSS 5 the first DLSS technology to generate the final displayed image instead of reconstructing a more expensive version of the normal render. Its examples are effects that are hard to author by hand, such as light scattering under skin and through foliage.
Nvidia's September 22 developer blog adds that DLSS 5 takes one frame in and puts one frame out, runs locally on a single GeForce RTX 50-series GPU, and supports output up to 4K. Developers get controls over how it behaves. They can choose between several models and mix them across scenes or cutscenes. Two sliders, Structure Intensity and Tone Intensity, tune fine detail and the broader lighting and colour response. Semantic AI masking and engine-level masks can switch the effect on or off for recognised scene elements or for specific assets such as glassware, water droplets and foliage.
Those controls explain most of what MakeUseOf saw. In an official integration, the studio decides where the neural pass applies and how strong it is. In a mod, nobody at CD Projekt Red or Rockstar has made those decisions.
How the DLSS 5 Swapper Mod Reaches Games Nvidia Never Enabled
Officially, DLSS 5 is available in very few places. Nvidia's developer blog says it is live in NBA 2K27 on all GeForce RTX 50-series desktop and laptop GPUs, and for GeForce NOW Ultimate members streaming from RTX 5080-class cloud machines. Nvidia also told reporters there would be no switch in the Nvidia App to turn on neural rendering per game. Whether a game supports DLSS 5 will depend on the developer implementing it.
The modding community filled that gap within days. VideoCardz reported that DLSS 5 Swapper v2.1.1 was released on September 2 and can install the leaked Neural Rendering runtime into supported PC games and emulators. The GitHub project is maintained by rakanki911. According to TweakTown, it automates adding DLSS 5 to supported and unsupported games (DX9-12 and many emulators) using DLSS5-Feeder and ReShade, and enables use on older RTX GPUs. Support for older cards is the reason an RTX 4070 could run it at all. The project also claims compatibility with GeForce RTX 20, RTX 30, RTX 40 and RTX 50 series GPUs through a patched nvngx_dlssnr.dll. The project's own README says the bundled neural model runs on Blackwell (RTX 50 / RTX PRO Blackwell); an older card needs a modded nvngx_dlssnr.dll you supply.
The name can mislead. The long-running DLSS Swapper utility, maintained by beeradmoore, only downloads and swaps DLSS, FSR and XeSS DLL files. Its documentation says plainly that it cannot add DLSS to a game that lacks it. The DLSS 5 tool is a separate project with a very different design. It offers several installation routes: RenoDX for games with native DLSS, the Feeder route for games without DLSS, OptiScaler, and a "multipass" route. All of them inject a neural pass through ReShade or a hook on the frame-presentation step. MakeUseOf calls it both "the DLSS Swapper mod" and "the DLSS 5 Swapper mod", and points readers to GitHub. The published test does not say which release or which route was used.
Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2 Lost Frames on the RTX 4070
The test PC was an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X with 16GB of DDR4-3200 and an RTX 4070 with 12GB of VRAM, running Windows 11 with no background apps. Games were freshly installed on a Gen3 NVMe SSD, and the swapper was the only mod. Biswas compared DLSS 5 against DLSS 4 Quality at 1080p and 1440p. His reported average frame rates are below, with the percentage change calculated from his numbers:
| Game (settings as reported) | 1080p DLSS 5 | 1080p DLSS 4 Quality | Change | 1440p DLSS 5 | 1440p DLSS 4 Quality | Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cyberpunk 2077 (Ultra, no RT) | 67 | 82 | −18% | 54 | 73 | −26% |
| Red Dead Redemption 2 | 62 | 88 | −30% | 57 | 74 | −23% |
| Onimusha: Way of the Sword | 70 | 80 | −13% | 62 | 72 | −14% |
Red Dead Redemption 2 is the most telling result. Biswas says the visual change there was small, yet it had the largest drop at 1080p. He treated the performance loss as evidence that the mod was actually running. Cyberpunk 2077 showed a more obvious visual change and fell by about a quarter at 1440p, going from 73fps to 54fps.
The published test doesn't say how the averages were captured, how many runs were made, or which driver and mod versions were installed. The numbers show which way performance moved on this machine, not how much DLSS 5 costs in general. Biswas suspects some of the loss comes from the mod not fully matching Nvidia's current Game Ready Driver. He also accepts that DLSS 5 uses a completely different pipeline, one aimed more at overhauling visuals than at raising frame rates.
Other testers have seen the same direction. The DLSS 5 Swapper's multipass release notes warn that running the neural pass more than once a frame "costs frames", with ten passes meaning ten times the neural work. TweakTown has covered a YouTuber whose two-pass run in Rise of the Tomb Raider improved image quality but tanked performance. Tom's Hardware also added a DLSS 5 mod to its unofficial frame-generation tests, noting that DLSS 5 is supposed to come to RTX 40-series cards later this year. That makes today's modded numbers a rough preview at best.
Lighting Gains in Onimusha Came at the Expense of Art Direction
Visually, Biswas says DLSS 5 "looks stunning (when it works)". The biggest effect was on lighting. In the RE Engine games he tried, Onimusha: Way of the Sword and Monster Hunter Wilds, the mod appeared to override global illumination and reflections with something that reminded him of Unreal Engine 5's Lumen. Character models looked cleaner and more grounded in the scene, but also more artificial.
His main complaint is about art direction. Cyberpunk 2077 and Onimusha both have a distinctive look, and Biswas felt the photorealistic relighting overpowered it. He called the result a consumer version of Nvidia's RTX Remix that doesn't need the remastering software. For him, the costs to art style and frame rate outweigh the lighting improvements.
Nvidia's framing fits this complaint. The company says DLSS 5 treats the engine's frame as an "unyielding foundation" and is trained to preserve character identity, scene semantics and composition. It then gives developers masks and intensity controls to decide what the model may change. In NBA 2K27, Nvidia says Visual Concepts used overall tone and style controls plus a per-pixel mask to tune character detail while keeping scanned player likenesses intact. A mod applied across a whole game has none of that studio-level tuning. TweakTown notes the swapper exposes developer-level controls to the user, but a user adjusting sliders is still not the art team signing off on a scene.
One detail matters more than it first appears. Nvidia's developer blog says DLSS 5 improves plain rasterised graphics, but that richer input, such as ray-traced or path-traced lighting, produces much more accurate results. Biswas ran Cyberpunk 2077 at Ultra with ray tracing off. It's reasonable to infer that a raster-only input left the model more to invent, which fits his experience of a flatter, more generic relighting in that game. The published test doesn't include a ray-tracing-on comparison that would confirm this.
RTX 4060, Nightreign and the Mod's Known Failure Points
Not every game worked. Monster Hunter Wilds, Elden Ring Nightreign and Dragon's Dogma 2 showed no substantial visual difference, and Nightreign crashed repeatedly with the swapper installed. On a second PC with an RTX 4060, DLSS 5 did run, which surprised Biswas. However, the card's 8GB of VRAM was a severe bottleneck in Onimusha and Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p.
The DLSS 5 Swapper's release notes list more hazards that anyone trying this should know about:
- The v2.2.7 notes say Nvidia driver 616.56 is the last one measured to complete a neural pass. The v2.2.5 and v2.2.6 notes say drivers 616.64 and newer fault inside Nvidia's own neural runtime, and the app warns you but still lets you install.
- The notes say anti-cheat-protected games may reject the add-ons. Tbreak reports the repository warns that injection can cause crashes or account bans on games with anti-cheat systems.
- Installs into games under Program Files can fail with an EPERM (permission) error. The v2.2.7 notes tell users to run the app as administrator or move the game.
- Microsoft Defender has removed the tool's overlay add-on as Trojan:Win32/Kepavll!rfn. The project calls this a machine-learning verdict on an unsigned native DLL, and newer builds name the missing file instead of failing silently.
- A "Restore originals" function is the documented way to put a game's files back exactly as they were. The notes also say uninstalling the app does not touch game folders, so restore first.
Tbreak adds that Nvidia has not endorsed the tool, so verify the release and its files before running them. The original DLSS Swapper project also warns about malicious sites pretending to be its downloads. With two similarly named tools and a leaked runtime involved, that warning applies twice over. The v2.2.x releases on the rakanki911 GitHub page include SHA-256 checksums for the installer and portable builds, so you can check a download before running it.
What this means for you
Most RTX 40-series owners should wait for official support, and should treat the mod as an experiment for a spare game install, not as a new default setting. Nvidia has said Ada Lovelace cards will get DLSS 5, but support will not arrive until the company further optimizes DLSS 5 performance on Blackwell GPUs, and NVIDIA is planning to introduce new DLSS 5 models this fall. RTX 50-series owners can already try the official version in NBA 2K27, with the developer's tuning applied.
If you do try the mod, keep a few things in mind:
- On an RTX 4070 in MakeUseOf's test, DLSS 5 lowered average frame rates by 13 to 30 percent compared with DLSS 4 Quality. Keep DLSS 4 or 4.5 if frame rate is your priority.
- Stay on a driver the DLSS 5 Swapper project reports as working, currently 616.56. Updating to 616.64 or later may stop the neural pass from completing.
- Avoid online games with anti-cheat. The mod does not bypass anti-cheat, and injecting it risks crashes or account action.
- An 8GB card such as the RTX 4060 can run the mod, but VRAM becomes the limit at 1440p in demanding games like Cyberpunk 2077.
- Only download from the project's GitHub releases page, check the published checksums, and use "Restore originals" before uninstalling or changing routes.
- Don't confuse the older DLSS Swapper DLL manager with the separate DLSS 5 Swapper project. Only the latter injects neural rendering.
Biswas's test shows DLSS 5 behaving the way Nvidia describes it: a generative pass that rewrites lighting and materials and uses GPU time to do it, not a free performance boost. On an unsupported RTX 4070, in Cyberpunk 2077 and Red Dead Redemption 2, that meant frames spent on a new look that the games' artists never tuned. The next milestones are Nvidia's new DLSS 5 models this fall, official RTX 40-series support after that, and studio integrations with their own masks and intensity settings. Until then, the modded version shows what the technology can do, and Biswas is sticking with DLSS 4 and 4.5 for everyday play.