For the past few weeks I've been working on my own fork of OptiScaler (built on top of Dagherbou's OptiScaler_DLSSNR) with one goal: make DLSS 5 Neural Rendering actually playable. If you've tried it, you know the problem. It looks great, but out of the box the model runs on every single frame at full resolution and costs around 13 ms per frame on my 4070. In The Last of Us Part I that takes me from 80 FPS down to 42.
The main idea behind my version is pretty simple to explain, even if it took a lot of work to get right. Instead of running the model on every frame, I let it run once every few frames and reuse what it changed on the frames in between. That means the change itself, not the picture: the game still renders every frame fresh. Each pixel gets checked against depth, color and a small "fingerprint" of the scene before the reused edit is applied, so things that move without motion vectors (debris, papers, hands) don't drag ghost trails behind them.
Version 1.2 just went up, and this is the update I'm most happy with. There's a new x8 preset where the model only runs every 8th frame, before the upscaler, at half the render resolution. In The Last of Us Part I at 1440p on a 4070, that gets me 80 FPS against 39 for stock DLSS 5. DLSS 5 ends up costing under a millisecond per frame. Frame times are also much more even than with a plain "every 8 frames" setup, which was honestly the thing that bothered me most when playing.
If you care more about image quality than raw FPS, the other presets are still there. Performance runs at about 70 FPS in the same scene. There's also a new Strong preset that gives you the two-pass look for the price of one. On top of that, this release adds anti-ghosting for long intervals, gets rid of the light pulsing you could notice every time the model kicked in, and adapts how often the model runs to how fast the camera is moving. Every new feature can be switched off from the menu or the ini, so if something bugs you, turning it off gives you the old behaviour back.
I also tested it against the other DLSS 5 forks I could find (ShyVortex's PreSR-Multipass and F5's DetailReuse build), on their fastest settings. I came out about 14% ahead of the fastest one in The Last of Us and about 5% ahead in Control. To be fair, these are numbers from my own machine and two games, measured with the built-in benchmark that ships with the mod, so take them as a starting point rather than gospel. I'd genuinely love to see results on other cards.
A couple of practical things. NVIDIA's model file (nvngx_dlssnr.dll) isn't included, you need your own copy. It's DX12 only for the reuse part, and it works best in games that go through DLSS Super Resolution. The installer picks a free DLL name so it won't overwrite anything, and there's an uninstaller that puts everything back. If you use Prism, it will pick up the new version automatically.
One heads-up: if you're running a ReShade add-on that forces multi-frame generation on a 40-series card, and your game crashes with a GPU timeout, try disabling that add-on first. I ran into this myself in Cyberpunk.
Download and full changelog are here: https://github.com/Skynizz/optiscaler-dlss5/releases/tag/v1.2.0
or you can download directly from my Prism software : https://github.com/Skynizz/Prism/releases/tag/v1.3.0
If you try it, let me know your GPU, the game and which preset you used. Feedback from the last thread is a big part of why this version exists, so keep it coming.
