Nvidia's shiny new DLSS 5 neural rendering just got its first official test drive in NBA 2K7, and Digital Foundry torched the performance claims. RTX 5090 at native 4K Ultra? It tanks from 128.4 FPS down to 62.7 FPS when the AI filter kicks in — a clean 40-60% hit across the board, including an RTX 5060 dropping from 72.8 to 42.3 FPS even at 1080p Ultra. Richard Leadbetter called it "super, super heavy," and the frame-time cost alone eats 8.2 to 13.7 milliseconds depending on the card and resolution.

The tech is supposed to add subtle lighting depth and jersey shadows without the face-melting weirdness from the March announcement, and Digital Foundry's John Linneman admitted the NBA 2K7 implementation feels "very, very subtle" and actually works pretty well for crowds and contact shadows. Problem is, it runs after upscaling as a fixed post-process tax on the entire RTX 50-series stack, including laptops, and even a "relatively light" sports sim bleeds performance like this. Nvidia's own marketing numbers hide behind 6x frame generation multipliers, but real on-vs-off tests confirm the base render rate craters.

This is DLSS's first swing at actually changing how games look instead of just making them run faster, and the debut price tag is brutal. Early mods in other titles showed similar 40-50%+ drops, and independent benches on lower cards make 60 FPS at 4K basically impossible without cranking frame gen to compensate. Nvidia promises optimizations, but right now DLSS 5 is an expensive lighting filter that turns your flagship GPU into a space heater for marginal visual upgrades.