OptiScaler + DLSS Neural Rendering v0.1.1-dlssnr
OptiScaler with an extra pass: NVIDIA's Neural Rendering model (dlss5), run over the upscaler's output to
synthesise detail. NVIDIA ships no public integration for it, so it is driven directly. Nothing here
is officially supported and none of it is documented by NVIDIA.
This is the second release and it is an experiment. It is off by default.
What you need
- An RTX 50 series card. The model does not run on anything older. I am aware of DLLs compiled for older GPUs but I have not tested them personally.
- A driver new enough to ship nvngx_dlssnr.dll. Minimum of 616.56.
- A game that already uses DLSS. Vulkan and DX11 support has been added but through OptiScaler's bridge. Although it makes DX and Vulkan viable, it comes with certain caveats I will detail below.
- nvngx_dlssnr.dll, supplied by you. See below.
Install
- Extract everything into the game folder, so the one with the game's .exe. It's not always the root folder.
- Run setup_windows.bat and answer its questions. It renames OptiScaler.dll to whatever the game will load and writes an uninstaller.
- Put nvngx_dlssnr.dll in that same folder.
- Launch, open the OptiScaler overlay, and enable Neural Rendering.
You can also bind a key to it, under Keybinds, "Neural Rendering". It is unbound by default. That
lets you flick the pass on and off without opening the menu.
DX11 and Vulkan, and the caveats
The bridge is already inside OptiScaler. There is nothing extra to download.
The model refuses to run on DX11, it answers FeatureNotSupported when asked. So the
game has to be lifted onto DX12 first, and that is what the bridge does: it turns the game's textures
into DX12 resources, runs a DX12 upscaler on them, and copies the result back. The pass runs there.
Vulkan takes the same route, through the same bridge.
The first caveat is that you have to pick a bridged upscaler yourself. Simply said, on loading into the game you need to check the top left dropdown of OptiScaler and choose an upscaler with "w/Dx12" written on it, so something like "FSR 3.X w/Dx12" or "XeSS w/Dx12". Usually, the bridged upscalers for DX11 are FSR and XeSS, and for Vulkan, only FSR. This means that your in-game upscaler will give its inputs to the bridged upscaler and this upscaler will ultimately deliver the final frame.
And this brings us to the biggest caveat, you cannot use DLSS as your upscaler in these games. DLSS on DX11 and
Vulkan is native, with no DX12 device anywhere near it, so picking DLSS means no Neural Rendering. You
are trading DLSS for FSR or XeSS to get the pass. Whether that is worth it is yours to judge, and the
comparison view is in the menu to help you judge it. I will continue my trials to get the bridge to pass DLSS but no promises.
Vulkan may also log a queue family mismatch warning from the bridge. That one is OptiScaler's, it
predates this, and it can affect the picture.
About the model DLL
nvngx_dlssnr.dll is not in this archive and will not be. It is NVIDIA's, it is not mine to
redistribute, and requests for it will not be answered. It comes from a driver package, and you need
one copy in each game folder. Please keep in mind that there is no shared or system-wide location.
The forwarder that ships here (nvngx.dll_dlssnr.dll, 108 KB) is not the model. It exists only
because the model refuses calls from any module whose path does not contain nvngx.dll, so the
forwarder is named to satisfy that check. It is a step that might be unnecessary, thus removed in future versions.
Credit
The colour composition, so how the model's answer is brought back into your frame, has been taken from
RenoDX's DLSS 5 addon by clshortfuse (github.com/clshortfuse/renodx), used under its MIT licence.
It is their design and it is the reason the colour holds together. See
Licenses/RenoDX_ATTRIBUTION.txt.
Removing it
Run the uninstaller setup_windows.bat wrote, or delete the files you extracted. Setting
Enabled=false under [DlssNr] in OptiScaler.ini turns off the pass while leaving OptiScaler
working normally.
Reporting problems
Include OptiScaler.log, your GPU and driver version, the game, and whether Ray Reconstruction and
frame generation were on. The log states why the pass did not start when it did not start, and that
line is usually the whole answer.