GoKawiilModders find workarounds to speed up Nvidia's DLSS 5 neural rendering
Independent testers have built two unofficial fixes for DLSS 5's steep performance cost, which Nvidia's own benchmarks showed can nearly halve frame rates on RTX 50-series cards. One method, a ReShade add-on called Neural Upstream, reorders the pipeline so the neural pass runs on the smaller pre-upscaled image rather than the full output frame, cutting its processing load by roughly two-thirds of the pixel count. Early tests on an RTX 4080 in Assassin's Creed Shadows show the neural rendering overhead dropping from about 32 FPS to 13 FPS lost, a 61% improvement, with similar gains reported in other titles.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
DLSS 5's neural rendering step was designed to run after upscaling, meaning its cost rises with display resolution instead of render resolution, which made the feature far more expensive than earlier DLSS versions. That community fixes are appearing within two weeks, without Nvidia's involvement, suggests the company's default implementation left obvious performance on the table and raises questions about whether Nvidia will adopt similar optimizations officially.
- DLSS 5 caused major FPS drops in Nvidia's own benchmarks, with only 9% recovered by upscaling.
- Modders built a ReShade tool that reorders the pipeline to run neural rendering before upscaling, cutting its cost significantly.
- The tradeoff is that processing a smaller, pre-upscaled image likely reduces the quality of the neural enhancement.
ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 5070 Graphics Card — If DLSS 5's neural rendering pass is chewing through frames, having a current-gen RTX 50 series card gives you the headroom to actually experiment with it — and with mods like Neural Upstream. The ASUS Dual RTX 5070 is a compact dual-fan card that slots into most mid-tower builds and supports Nvidia's latest DLSS feature set.
See ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 5070 Graphics Card on Amazon → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission on purchases, at no extra cost to you. Product picked by AI based on this article; it is not a tested recommendation.Source: techspot.com — Julio Franco, 2026-09-08
Published there as: “Modders have already found two ways to make DLSS 5 playable, and neither one is Nvidia's”
Read the original report → The summary and analysis above are GoKawiil's own, written from reporting by the source above. Facts and quotes belong to the original publisher.