I still remember my first NBA game. It was NBA 2002 on the PlayStation, and at that time, simply being able to play as some of the biggest NBA stars in a proper basketball game already felt pretty impressive. Looking back at it today, the visuals obviously haven’t aged particularly well, but it was one of those games that got me interested in the genre.
I did play quite a few other NBA games along the way, although I eventually stopped following the series as closely. The last NBA 2K title I played was NBA 2K16, and even then, I was already amazed by how much the graphics had improved compared to the earlier generations of NBA games I grew up with. Now, here we are with NBA 2K27.
Naturally, one of the things I was most interested in seeing was just how much the visuals have improved after all these years. This is especially interesting on the PC version, as NBA 2K27 is among the first games to implement NVIDIA’s new DLSS 5 3D-Guided Neural Rendering technology.
Unlike conventional DLSS Super Resolution, which focuses primarily on reconstructing a higher-resolution image from a lower-resolution input, DLSS 5 is designed to improve the way the game renders materials, lighting, and characters. NVIDIA’s implementation in NBA 2K27 specifically targets things such as skin, hair, facial details, clothing, and lighting, using the game’s existing scene information to guide the neural rendering process.
That makes NBA 2K27 quite an interesting showcase for the technology. Rather than simply asking whether DLSS 5 gives us more frames, I wanted to see whether it could actually make a game that already looks good feel more realistic.
Testing NBA 2K27 With and Without DLSS 5
For our hands-on testing, we started with DLSS Neural Rendering disabled. This gives us the standard rendering experience without the additional neural rendering process. We then enabled DLSS Neural Rendering and repeated the same type of gameplay to see how much difference it actually makes.
It is worth clarifying that NVIDIA’s DLSS 5 implementation is currently designed for GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs, and NBA 2K27 exposes the feature through its Neural Rendering option. NVIDIA positions this as a 3D-guided neural rendering technology rather than simply another upscaling preset.
For the purpose of this hands-on test, I was less interested in producing a long list of benchmark numbers and more interested in the actual visual difference during gameplay. After all, this is a basketball game.
You spend most of your time watching players move around the court, rather than staring at a static benchmark scene. And that turns out to be quite important when evaluating DLSS 5.
NBA 2K27 Already Looks Good Without DLSS 5
Let’s start with the baseline. With Neural Rendering disabled, NBA 2K27 already looks pretty good. That’s more or less what I expected.
The player models have plenty of detail, the arenas look convincing, and the overall presentation has become much more realistic compared to the NBA games I remember playing years ago. The improvement isn’t limited to the players either. The courts, lighting, crowd, and surrounding environment all contribute to the overall presentation.
This is especially noticeable when you compare it to older generations of basketball games. The faces of the players no longer look like generic approximations of the real athletes. Their facial structures are much more recognisable, while things like hair, clothing, and skin already have a reasonable amount of detail.
So, if you’re playing NBA 2K27 without DLSS 5, you’re certainly not getting an ugly game. In fact, I think the standard rendering already provides a pretty convincing representation of a modern basketball game.
This makes the DLSS 5 comparison more interesting because NVIDIA’s technology isn’t coming in to rescue a poorly rendered game. It has to improve an image that is already reasonably good.
DLSS 5 Makes the Players Look Surprisingly Realistic
Once Neural Rendering is enabled, the difference becomes much easier to appreciate. The most obvious improvement is the players themselves.
Skin looks more natural, facial features have better depth, and hair appears more convincing under different lighting conditions. Rather than simply increasing sharpness, the image appears to have a more realistic interaction between the character’s materials and the surrounding lighting.
This is where DLSS 5 starts to demonstrate what makes it different from traditional image reconstruction technologies. The effect is especially noticeable during close-ups, replays, and moments when the camera moves close to the players.
The skin doesn’t simply look sharper. It has a more natural appearance, with lighting producing softer transitions across the face rather than being all smooth and shiny. Hair, clothing, and other elements on the court also benefit from the additional treatment, while the player’s overall appearance feels less like a conventional game character and more like a digital recreation of an actual person.
Again, we’re not talking about suddenly adding millions of polygons to the player model. The underlying game assets are still important. Instead, DLSS 5 is making better use of the information already available in the scene. That distinction is important.
The Crowd Benefits Too
Another aspect that I found interesting is that the visual improvements aren’t restricted to the main players. The surrounding audience and courtside characters also receive improvements from the neural rendering process.
This helps because the players aren’t existing in isolation. If you make the players on the court look extremely realistic while the rest of the arena remains noticeably artificial, i.e flat looking blurry crowd, the illusion falls apart quite quickly.
NBA 2K27’s DLSS 5 implementation instead attempts to improve the wider scene, which makes the visual upgrade feel more cohesive. There are still differences between the highly detailed player models and some of the lower-detail background characters, of course.
DLSS 5 isn’t magically replacing all of the game’s assets with photorealistic models, but for something happening across an entire basketball arena, the result is impressive.
DLSS 5 Is More About Image Quality Than FPS
This is perhaps the most important thing to understand about DLSS 5. Despite the DLSS branding, 3D-Guided Neural Rendering isn’t primarily about increasing performance.
DLSS 5’s neural rendering component is doing something different. It is spending additional GPU resources to improve the appearance of the scene. In other words, you’re effectively making the GPU work harder to make the game look better.
That is why the performance hit can be substantial when Neural Rendering is used without MFG, and why the combination of Neural Rendering and MFG makes more sense for high-refresh-rate gaming. Personally, I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing.
Not every graphics technology needs to exist solely to increase FPS. If the goal is to make the game look better, I’m perfectly fine with a technology that trades some native rendering performance for a meaningful visual improvement, provided the resulting image quality is worth the cost. And in NBA 2K27, I think it is.
MFG Helps, But Basketball Is a Difficult Test
NBA 2K27 supports NVIDIA’s Multi Frame Generation, allowing additional frames to be generated between traditionally rendered frames. On paper, this sounds like a perfect pairing with DLSS 5. In practice, however, sports games are a much more challenging environment for frame generation than some other game genres due to the pacing of the game.
In sports games, players are constantly changing directions at different speeds, the ball moves rapidly between players, players overlap one another, and other elements move across the screen. All of these things give frame-generation algorithms more opportunities to make mistakes, and those mistakes can become noticeable.
For our testing, MFG 2X is the setting I’d be most comfortable recommending. With 2X enabled, the additional generated frames help compensate for the performance cost of Neural Rendering while keeping visual artifacts relatively difficult to notice during normal gameplay. They are still there.
If you deliberately stop and look for them, you can find instances where generated frames don’t perfectly reproduce fast-moving objects. But during normal gameplay, they’re easy enough to overlook.
Things become more obvious when moving up to MFG 4X. The higher generation factor gives the system more work to do in terms of predicting intermediate frames, and basketball’s unpredictable motion makes some of the resulting artifacts easier to spot.
This is particularly noticeable around moving players and areas where multiple players overlap. That’s not necessarily a fault unique to NBA 2K27. We’ve seen similar limitations with frame generation in other games. It’s simply more noticeable here because basketball has so many unpredictable movements happening simultaneously.
For that reason, I’d rather have a slightly lower generated-frame multiplier with cleaner visuals than chase the highest possible frame-rate number.
From NBA 2002 to This
This is where my personal experience with NBA games makes the whole thing a little more interesting. When I first played NBA 2002, the idea that we would eventually have digital versions of NBA players with this level of facial detail would have sounded ridiculous. Even when I was playing NBA 2K16, I was already impressed by how realistic the players looked compared to the older games.
Now, NBA 2K27 can take those existing player models and push their appearance even further using neural rendering. The difference is particularly obvious in the small details. Skin doesn’t look like a simple texture pasted onto a face, hair has more convincing depth, lighting interacts with the player’s features more naturally, and even the crowd and surrounding characters benefit from improved lighting and material treatment.
When you put all of that together, the overall presentation feels considerably more realistic.
Is DLSS 5 Just AI Slop?
I know not everyone is going to enjoy this direction. There will undoubtedly be people who look at DLSS 5 and simply call it another example of “AI slop.” And that’s a fair criticism to discuss as the industry continues to adopt AI-based rendering technologies.
But personally, after actually spending time with NBA 2K27, I don’t think that description does the implementation justice. At least in this case, DLSS 5 isn’t simply generating an entirely new character and replacing the work done by the game’s artists. The technology works with the existing game scene and uses that information to improve how materials and lighting are rendered. The underlying player models and assets are still fundamental to the final result.
For me, this is more comparable to another tool in the rendering pipeline. And if that tool can take a game from “this looks like a very good video game” to “wait, that actually looks surprisingly realistic” without completely destroying image quality, I’m willing to give it a chance.
Final Thoughts
After spending some time with NBA 2K27, I’m quite impressed with what DLSS 5 brings to the table. Without Neural Rendering, the game already looks good. The player models are detailed, the arenas are convincing, and the overall presentation is a huge step forward from the NBA games I remember playing years ago.
With DLSS 5 enabled, however, the experience becomes noticeably more realistic. The biggest improvements are visible on the players, particularly their skin, hair, facial features, and interaction with lighting. The surrounding crowd and courtside characters also benefit, helping the entire scene feel more cohesive.
It isn’t perfect. The performance cost is high, and Multi Frame Generation is useful if you want to maintain a high frame rate. For our experience, MFG 2X feels like the better balance, while MFG 4X makes the familiar frame-generation artifacts considerably easier to notice. And that’s particularly relevant in basketball because the constant movement of players, hands, and the ball makes those artifacts easier to spot compared to more predictable game environments. Still, this has been a surprisingly fun experience.
I know not everyone will enjoy this approach, and some will probably dismiss it as yet another example of AI being pushed into games. But coming from the earlier versions of NBA where a player’s face could look like a pixelated smudge, seeing today’s digital athletes rendered with convincing skin, hair, facial features, and lighting is pretty incredible. And for those of us who enjoy seeing just how far PC graphics technology can go, I’ll take that as a win for DLSS 5.
