"There's no such thing as can't": Modder brings full DLSS to AMD cards
If you want DLSS, you need an Nvidia card, and if you want the latest FSR, you need a current Radeon. That has been the manufacturers' stance until now. A modder is now showing that it can be done differently. And all by himself.
Daniel Blanco has massively expanded his «DLSS-NR on AMD» project. In September, it initially ran «only» DLSS 5 Neural Rendering on Radeon cards. The Alpha 0.8.0 version released on October 17 now brings almost the entire DLSS stack to AMD GPUs: DLSS 4.5 Super Resolution, Ray Reconstruction, and Frame Generation with up to four-fold multi-frame generation. Additionally, FSR 4.1.1 is included so that the mod does not depend on the driver. The whole thing is installed via the new mod manager NeuralHub, which automatically detects the games.
Important to know: This is not Nvidia's code running on AMD hardware. According to the developer, he has re-implemented the DLSS runtimes from scratch using his own HIP kernels, meaning natively without a translation layer. However, you must provide the Nvidia DLLs yourself.
Three Radeon generations are supported. RDNA 4 and RDNA 3 get the full range of features, while support for RDNA 2 is still experimental and limited to Neural Rendering. The developer's goal is ambitious: eventually, an RX 9070 XT should achieve the DLSS performance of an RTX 5070 Ti.
According to Blanco, the image quality is intended to come very close to that of DLSS on Nvidia cards, but «some effects» do not yet work 100 percent. Initial user reports are mixed. One Reddit user claims to have measured no performance loss in Cyberpunk 2077 with path tracing at 1440p on an RX 9070 XT. Others are losing up to 25 percent of their FPS. Furthermore, the mod only works in DirectX 12 games on Windows 11. Anti-cheat software blocks it.
Whether the project will ever leave the alpha stage remains to be seen. However, it shows that the hardware boundaries for upscaling features are not as rigid as manufacturers like to portray. The fact that a single developer is enough to achieve this is unlikely to be well-received by either Nvidia or AMD.
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