DLSS 5 on Apple M5 Pro Delivers Higher Image Quality but 10x RTX 5050 Latency

NVIDIA’s newest DLSS 5 has been tested on Apple’s M5 Pro through an unofficial experimental layer. The testing examined the image-quality changes associated with the latest iteration of the company’s upscaling technology and its Neural Rendering changes.

The unofficial implementation places heavy demands on modern GPUs. In various modded games, performance was severely reduced. On Apple Silicon using the M5 Pro, DLSS 5 produced major image-quality improvements but also brought significant trade-offs, including single-digit framerates and input latency 10 times higher than on a desktop RTX 5050.

The M5 Pro’s weak performance with DLSS 5 enabled is attributed to its lack of dedicated FP8 hardware units. The results therefore show both the potential visual benefit of the technology and the performance cost of running this unofficial version on Apple hardware.