NVIDIA is walking back the idea that DLSS 5 stays locked to its newest cards forever. A company spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that 3D-Guided Neural Rendering will still launch first on GeForce RTX 50 Series, but NVIDIA officially plans to expand support to older GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs once 50-series performance is more fully tuned.

The confirmation lands a day after DLSS 5 debuted Wednesday evening, Sept. 3, 2026, in NBA 2K27 for RTX 50 Series desktops and laptops plus GeForce NOW — coverage we published separately. Thursday’s statement is the platform follow-up: not a second launch story, but a clear change from RTX 50-only framing toward a staged rollout.

In a statement provided to The Verge, NVIDIA said:

“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.”

Spokesperson Rajal Maharaj underscored the same sequence when asked about even older hardware: right now the focus is the 50-series; once that feels solid, NVIDIA will look at the 40-series. The company did not commit to RTX 30 or RTX 20 Series support in the Verge exchange, even as community mods have experimented with leaked builds on older cards.

Gamers hoping for the same granular sliders modders already expose should not count on NVIDIA shipping them in the consumer UI. The company told The Verge:

“For gamers, DLSS 5 is a simple on-or-off toggle. The more granular artistic controls are for developers, including model selection, Structure Intensity, Tone Intensity, automatic masking and custom per-pixel masking.”

Developers can still surface some of those knobs in their own settings menus if they choose — the same path early DLSS Super Resolution took from a binary switch to quality presets and percentages. NVIDIA also notes that semantic AI masking can automatically recognize scene objects (faces, textiles, foliage, and more), while engine-level masking lets artists isolate props or asset groups. Unreal Engine 5 has a native plug-in, and NVIDIA provides SDKs; the company says the models run on every frame with no minimum frame-rate requirement for the feature to work.

What remains fuzzy is the wider game pipeline beyond NBA 2K27. When The Verge asked NVIDIA to reconfirm previously named titles such as Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Hogwarts Legacy, Starfield, and Resident Evil Requiem, the company would only say more games are on the way, that many developers are actively integrating DLSS 5, and that it will share updates as partners finalize integrations.

Dated Friday, Sept. 4, 2026: DLSS 5 stays an RTX 50 first-wave feature for now, with official RTX 40 Series support on NVIDIA’s stated roadmap after fall model updates — and with end users still looking at an on/off switch, not a full art-direction panel.

Sources