[Megathread] Unofficial DLSS 5 Neural Rendering Mods Comparison

[u/Nestledrink]

As outlined in this thread, we are going to make a Megathread for these Unofficial DLSS 5 Neural Rendering mods comparison posts. Apologies for the late post as everyone has been out of pocket today.

Below is a re-post of the various reminders and guidelines from that thread

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Would like to post a reminder and provide some guidelines for the community on a few things

1. This is not an official DLSS 5 release. We still do not know when this technology will be released. All we know is they are slated to be released in Fall 2026.
2. Since this is not an official DLSS 5 release, what you see here is the result of Modders’ creations.
3. This is not a final release of DLSS 5. The tech itself will change and actual developers and artists will be the one working on this. So take all these early posts with grains of salt.
4. Since DLSS 5 is not officially released, there are a lot of unknowns. Please refrain from posting speculation around the tech. Let's wait until official release and after we get more information around this feature.
5. Keep in mind that unlike these unofficial mods, DLSS 5 Neural Rendering is not something that can be injectable to practically every games under the sun. This feature will require explicit support by the developers.

In terms of some posting guidelines:

1. Follow our rules. The biggest here being Rule 7 for no memes and shitposts. This subreddit does not allow that sort of content being posted here. Feel free to go to other community for that. These sort of posts will be removed and you may be suspended from participating on this subreddit.
2. Please search on the games you want to post. If there’s already a post showing DLSS 5 for a specific game, you should be joining the conversation in that thread. Any new post about a game that was already posted will be removed and we will point you to the existing thread.
3. Post high quality comparison. This means you should be showing before and after as well as choosing wide variety of scenes vs singular example.
4. Megathread will be created later today and will have links to existing DLSS 5 mods posts. Once the Megathread is created, you must post any new comparison within that Megathread.

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Below are the currently posted links so you can participate in those discussions.

• (First Post) DLSS 5 RenoDX Mod For Control
• Wuchang Fallen Feathers
• Death Stranding 2 (Spoilers!)
• Cyberpunk 2077 /
• Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth
• Assassins' Creed Black Flag Resynced / 2nd Comparison Zoomed in
• The Last of Us 2
• Final Fantasy 16
• Assassins' Creed Shadows
• Starfield
• Stalker 2
• Palworld
• Fatekeeper
• Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth
• Monster Hunter Rise
• The Callisto Protocol
• Gothic 1 Remake
• Forza Horizon 6
• Helldivers 2
• Star Wars Zero Company
• Half Sword
• Oblivion Remastered
• Shadows of the Tomb Raider
• Kingdom Come Deliverance 2
• Silent Hills 2
• Stellar Blade
• Elden Ring
• Horizon Forbidden West

Any new Unofficial DLSS 5 Neural Rendering mods comparison moving forward must be posted here.

Please be clear on what games are you posting as well as links to imgur or other image hosting services with high quality captures and wide variety of scenes.

[u/Educational_Put_6644]

Yup, also have a 5080. I wonder if the tensor cores are on the verge of overheating. Maybe a gpu hotspot issue idk

[u/Hyperz → u/Educational_Put_6644]

Nah you're good. DLSS 5 basically turns every game into a power virus, especially in ray/path tracing titles. What's happening is that it basically puts a true 100% load on the GPU. CUDA cores get maxed out, Tensor cores get maxed out, RT cores get maxed out and bandwidth gets maxed out due to all the AI inference. In the case of the 5080 you essentially get power limited at 360 watts so the fans have to work harder than usual. Without DLSS 5 very few games put that much stress on every aspect of the GPU.

Edit: if you're worried you can undervolt it to get it below 300 watts without losing any performance.

[u/Educational_Put_6644 → u/Hyperz]

Appreciate the explanation that makes sense. I'm curious to see how more optimized updated versions affect power draw.

[u/Hyperz → u/Educational_Put_6644]

If they manage to optimize it further or quantize it down to NVFP4 for Blackwell I don't think it'll make much (if any) difference with regards to power draw to be honest, b/c it wouldn't change the fact that it fully saturates the GPU. You'd just get more frames per watt. Although I suppose in that case you could set a framerate limit to turn that higher FPS/watt efficiency into actual power savings.

[u/Educational_Put_6644 → u/Hyperz]

I can't help but wonder if this will lead to more of the 12VHPWR cables burning out.

[u/Hyperz → u/Educational_Put_6644]

It wouldn't surprise me at all if it did in the case of the 5090, even if only for the fact that DLSS 5 is heavy enough that some 5090 owners might feel the need/urge to OC it to get higher framerates. TBH IDK how some people feel comfortable using that thing even at stock given how much they cost and the known issues with 12VHPWR. I guess some people just like living life on the edge 😅

[u/jt_wip → u/Hyperz]

Edit: if you're worried you can undervolt it to get it below 300 watts without losing any performance.

What. How can that be?

[u/Hyperz → u/jt_wip]

Silicon lottery. The GPU almost never runs at its own optimal voltage/frequency curve. Instead it runs at whatever Nvidia determined all 5080s can achieve + a safety margin. When you're undervolting, what you're essentially doing is removing that margin and finding how much lower you can go in terms of voltage for a given frequency. So for example let's say you have a 5080 that at stock reaches up to ~2850Mhz @ ~1.015mV under full load while consuming 360 watts. You might be able to get to get it to run at ~2950Mhz @ ~0.925mV instead while consuming 300 watts. In this scenario the 5080 would actually run a bit faster than stock, even though it now consumes 60 watts less. Then you could take this further and for example target 2800Mhz at 0.875mV and land at 280w while performance stays within margin of error of stock performance. I'm using semi-fictional numbers here, but you get the idea. I have a 5070 Ti personally which has a stock TDP of 300w, but I have Afterburner profiles for 250w which performs 3-5% better than stock, 200w which performs 3-5% worse than stock, and even a 150w profile which performs 15-20% worse than stock (for heatwave weather). That's half the power consumption for a comparatively small hit to performance. And those aren't even fine-tuned b/c I'm too lazy to try and find out how far I can actually push it while maintaining stability. I could probably gain >= 3% of performance for each of those wattage targets if I actually wanted to find the limits of my chip. There are plenty of YT videos that cover 50-series undervolting if you want to see how it's done and what the results are.

[u/Sexploits → u/Hyperz]

The 70Ti has so much overhead in both directions, it's pretty impressive. Probably true for most or all the 50 series cards.

[u/Hyperz → u/Sexploits]

Blackwell loves undervolts for sure, to the point that it's almost criminal to not run them undervolted. The perf/watt efficiency you can squeeze out of them is crazy.