With DLSS 5 officially available (and unofficially via fan-made mod tools), gamers have been testing out its new neural rendering feature on all kinds of setups. Here’s the latest we’ve come across: a modder has neural rendering running on a dedicated GPU. Nvidia currently only supports current-gen RTX 50 Series GPUs, though it says proper RTX 40 support is coming in the future.

In any case, the modder, Marcelo Guibout, has managed to offload the performance-taxing DLSS 5 neural rendering feature to a second GPU. He’s using two RTX 5060 Ti 16GB graphics cards to get the job done, handling game rendering on the main card and neural rendering on the second, while using a ReShade add-on known as MGPU Bridge to transfer over the DLSS 5 visuals.

DLSS 5 neural rendering offloaded to a second GPU

Back when Nvidia first showcased DLSS 5 earlier this year, it was using two flagship RTX 5090 cards to do so, with one of them running the game as normal, and the other dedicated to neural rendering. Between then and launch, the company has optimized the feature so it runs around 5x faster (and is suitable for a single GPU setup). But what if you want to go the double GPU route?

Well, with Guibout’s mod, you can enjoy much better performance using this method. It’s important to point out that dual-GPU setups are a thing of the past after Nvidia fully cut support for physical SLI and NVLink bridges with the RTX 40 series onwards. As such, neither technology is being utilized with this mod. “Neural rendering is a terminal stage. It takes a finished frame and returns a finished frame, so it can be picked up and executed somewhere else entirely,” the modder explains.

So far, Guibout has demonstrated the technique in two games: The Blood of Dawnwalker and Cyberpunk 2077. Benchmarks for Blood of Dawnwalker at 1080p below detail the difference in performance. When rendering at full resolution with DLAA, there’s no performance cost on the second card, and the gap increasingly widens as DLSS’s upscaling modes get stronger.

We’ve seen similar double-GPU setups like this before, back when people were using a dedicated card for 32-bit PhysX support. For context, the RTX 50 series launched without support, but Nvidia did end up adding it with a driver update. Another use case is with the popular Lossless Scaling tool, where gamers are offloading the upscaling & frame gen workload for even more FPS.

About the Author

Jack Goodall

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.