Modders 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.