It is highly recommended (what am i even saying ? it is beyond recommended) to switch over to this version. 0.1.2 fixes most of the color mapping issues by reading the exposure texture DLSS is handed, which allows us to read the correct value from the source. If a game doesn’t expose it, usually it means it doesn’t need to, which is why it worked flawlessly on titles like Cyberpunk 2077. Manually adjusting the white point was a patchwork but some titles needed constant tuning depending on the lighting. Besides this, this version fixes issues present in Nioh3, may also fix other games but haven't tested. Finally, and the big new addition, this version introduces a native Vulkan path so DLSS is now completely usable on Vulkan. (more in depth changelog to come).
Edit - If you downloaded the build in the first 20-25 minutes : Forgot to mention, to fix the colors please find the "Take the white point from the game" toggle and then if next to it you see "This game supplies an exposure. Tick above to use it" then toggle it on. If you toggle it on when the text is orange, it doesn’t do anything so really it’s safe to leave it on if you prefer. In this build the toggle defaults to off, this is my mistake and has been addressed. Nothing that impacts the experience, just a bit of an annoyance. - Anybody who downloaded later, the new build has the checkbox on by default.
What is it ?
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.
What you need
- Newest drivers for your GPU (minimum of 616.56). For usage with older than Blackwell architectures, please use a modded nvngx_dlssnr.dll.
- A game that already uses DLSS. Vulkan is now completely supported. DX11 still requires the bridge, which has its peculiar downsides
- As mentioned above, 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 the peculiar downside
(same section as the old "DX11 and Vulkan, and the caveats", only excluding Vulkan. Thought it needed a fresh title)
The bridge is already inside OptiScaler. There is nothing extra to download.
The model flat out 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.
The first downside is that you have to pick a bridged upscaler yourself. Simply said, on loading into the game you need to check the top left drop-down 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. 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, 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. DX11 interop may come at a later date.
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 color 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 license.
It is their design and it is the reason the color holds together. See
Licenses/RenoDX_ATTRIBUTION.txt.
Two ideas for running the model below native resolution come from hhkbble, from their pull request
against this fork. The frame is now reduced with an exact-area box filter rather than point sampled,
so less aliasing reaches the model to begin with; and the matched residual takes only the model's
difference at low resolution and lays it on the frame's own full-resolution proxy, instead of
composing a small picture against a large one and reading the down sample blur as detail. The
cube-scaled residual is theirs. Both are selectable under Enlargement in the menu.
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. Issues an Discussions are now open, please keep in mind that Issues is reserved for clear and reproducible bugs, if you are not sure use Discussions.