NVIDIA DLSS 5 unofficially ported to Apple M5 Pro

Developers have successfully performed an unofficial port of NVIDIA’s DLSS 5 neural rendering model to Apple Silicon, specifically testing on the M5 Pro chip. The implementation utilizes ReShade to connect the Metal backend to Windows games via the Game Porting Toolkit.

While the DLSS 5 integration improved visual elements such as surface lighting, ambient occlusion, and spatial depth, it resulted in a significant performance penalty. Tests on the 16-core GPU M5 Pro showed frame rates dropping to 2.32 FPS at 1440p resolution, with input latency reaching 240ms.

This performance degradation is attributed to insufficient FP8 support on the M5 Pro. Because the chip lacks dedicated hardware units for FP8 precision—which DLSS 5 relies on for neural network inference—the workload must run via the FP16 path. The M5 Pro’s FP8 peak computing power is estimated at 26 TOPS, significantly lower than the approximately 105 TOPS found in a desktop RTX 5,050.