Modders halved Control's frame rate with a DLSS 5 build pulled from NBA 2K27

A filter that cannot read material assignments has to infer material from pixels. Nvidia has said the model applying these visuals does not take in much of the rendering pipeline, including the physically based rendering data that tells an engine which surface is wood and which is metal, and that DLSS 5 reinterprets a scene with AI ^[6]. Guessing is how you get a protagonist with new laugh lines and hair that drifts from red toward burgundy ^[10]. Gizmodo's reading of Control is the one that will land with anyone who has sat through an art review: the game's palette is built on office grays with sparks of orange and red, and Remedy colored Jesse's hair to carry that ^[11]. Players said much the same about the first renditions after the March reveal, complaining the model ignored artistic intent ^[14][4]. The mod has since been dropped into Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Last of Us Part II ^[12], and one Redditor's Wuchang: Fallen Feathers build gave its protagonist more of a supermodel look ^[13].

The performance figures are worth converting, because percentages flatter the faster card. Control goes from above 70 fps to about 35 on an RTX 5070 Ti ^[1], and the recorded footage shows above 90 fps dropping to the low 50s on an RTX 5080 ^[2], a cut of 50 percent and roughly 42 percent ^[17]. In frame time, which is what a studio actually budgets, that is about 14.3 ms per frame becoming 28.6 ms on the 5070 Ti and 11.1 ms becoming 19.2 ms on the 5080, so neural rendering is charging somewhere between 8 and 14 ms on top of everything else the frame already pays for ^[18]. That gap eats directly into any 60 fps target a studio has set.

The pitch is a rendering advance, but this build post-processes character models against a preset, with an on/off switch, an intensity slider and a style slider ^[7], seven styles, and characters only so far ^[9]. The style slider is the part a producer should look at harder than the frame time. Frame cost can be negotiated down with internal resolution. A slider that hands players seven readings of a character the art team specified once turns direction into a default ^[9].

Nvidia told SIGGRAPH 2026 it had toned down the harshest aspects and got DLSS 5 running on lower-end RTX 50-series cards ^[15], and this build is not the shipping product ^[8]. Both statements can be true at once, and a studio still has no finished build to plan around.

The test that travels to your own vendor layer is simple: whether it reads your inputs or repaints your outputs, and whether control sits with your team or the end user. DLSS 4.5 sits on the first side of both axes, and its standing as an upscaler is measured in frames it gives back ^[16]. Anything landing in the repaint-outputs quadrant with the slider in the player's hands belongs in the settings menu beside film grain, costed at its worst measured frame time rather than its demo.