A leaked version of Nvidia's DLSS 5 model, which surfaced alongside NBA 2K27, has been modded into numerous games by the community using an Optiscaler injection method, ahead of the technology's official September 3 launch. Tom's Hardware tested this community build in Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy, and Control to gauge its performance and power costs on RTX 5090 hardware, noting that Nvidia's own published figure of 8 milliseconds per frame at 4K closely matched what the Optiscaler implementation showed, suggesting the results may be representative of the tech's official performance profile.
Testing used two RTX 5090 variants: the Founders Edition, which is limited to a single 12V-2x6 power connector and a 575W power limit, and the MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z, which has a dual-connector design and a 1000W power limit via its Extreme vBIOS. Test settings included 4K output via DLSS Performance upscaling, maximum ray-tracing or path-tracing settings, and DLSS Ray Reconstruction, without Multi Frame Generation.
Across the three games, the Founders Edition suffered frame-rate drops of 42 to 49 percent with DLSS 5 enabled, while consistently hitting its 575W power ceiling. In Cyberpunk 2077, its power draw rose from 482W to 551W. In Control, it again ran into its power limit. The Lightning Z posted smaller percentage frame-rate losses in most tests—39 percent in Cyberpunk 2077 and 42 percent in both Hogwarts Legacy and Control—while maintaining much higher raw frame rates and 1% lows.
The Lightning Z's power draw increases were substantial when DLSS 5 was active. In Cyberpunk 2077, power rose from 580W to 723W, a 25 percent increase. In Hogwarts Legacy, draw jumped from 480W to 720W, a 50 percent increase. In Control, power climbed from 691W to 802W. These figures indicate that DLSS 5 can consume significant additional power when a card has the headroom to provide it, which the single-connector Founders Edition does not.
Tom's Hardware noted that the Founders Edition's performance under DLSS 5 appeared limited by its power ceiling rather than a lack of compute capability, and that DLSS 5 places heavy demand on Tensor Cores. Both outlets suggested that single-connector RTX 5090 cards may be underprovisioned for the feature as currently implemented, and that official DLSS 5 support—launching September 3 with NBA 2K27—will show whether Nvidia's first-party implementation via its Streamline framework performs differently on the Founders Edition. Both sources raised the possibility that fully realizing DLSS 5's potential may require future Super variants or next-generation graphics cards with higher power limits or more advanced Tensor Cores.