The leak did not come from a keynote. It came from a basketball game. Data miners found a DLSS 5 DLL inside NBA 2K27 during early access, and the RenoDX ReShade modders put the unfinished filter into other titles — Control among them — before Nvidia had a public switch.

TechSpot recorded the cost on hardware people actually own: an RTX 5070 Ti at 4K dropped from 71 fps to 35 fps with the mod on. An RTX 5090 demo in the same reporting went from 91 fps to 50 fps. That is not the old DLSS bargain, where the network bought frames. This network spends them.

What leaked is not a sharpening slider

Prior DLSS reconstructed a frame the renderer had already decided to draw. DLSS 5, as Nvidia framed it at GTC and as the leaked runtime behaves, is generative: it changes lighting and surfaces after the fact. Character faces in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth tests were the tell — prettier walls, people the original artists would not sign. XDA’s write-up of one leaked-build session put the hit near 50 percent. Hold that number as a measurement of an unfinished file, not as a driver promise.

Read TechSpot on the DLL and the fps tables. Then wait for the game Nvidia actually ships the toggle in — not for a ReShade path that was never on the box.