Most Radeon owners know the situation. A new game ships with exactly one upscaler, it is DLSS, and DLSS does not run on your card. Or there is FSR, but version 2.1, the kind that smears everything the moment you turn the camera. The studio is not going to update it, because the game is three years old and nobody works on it any more.
OptiScaler solves this bluntly and effectively. It sits between the game and the upscaler and swaps one for the other. The game thinks it is rendering through DLSS. What it actually gets is FSR 4.
The problem it solves
The upscaler in a game is nailed down during development. The studio picks one, usually the one it was paid to integrate or the one that was easiest to bolt on. After that your graphics card is either in that decision or it is not.
OptiScaler intercepts the calls the game makes to its upscaler and reroutes them. From there you decide what actually reconstructs the frame.
- The game only has DLSS and your card is AMD. You switch to FSR 4 and get decent image quality instead of a locked menu item.
- The game ships an ancient FSR 2. Swap it for FSR 4 or XeSS and the smearing in motion goes away.
- The game has no frame generation at all. OptiFG can add it where the developers never included it.
- You want to tune things. Sharpening, presets, ratios, dynamic resolution overrides, all of it is exposed.
What it supports
The list depends on what the game is built on.
- DirectX 12. XeSS, FSR 2.1.2 and 2.2.1, FSR 3.X, FSR 4.X, DLSS.
- DirectX 11. FSR 2.2.1, FSR 3.1.2, DLSS, XeSS 2.X on Intel Arc cards, plus DX12 upscalers through the D3D11on12 bridge.
- Vulkan. FSR 4.X, FSR 2.1.2 and 2.2.1, FSR 3.1, DLSS, XeSS 2.x.
- Frame generation. FSR3-FG, XeFG and FSR4-FG, still experimental and DirectX 12 only.
One thing to keep in mind: FSR 4 on the output side needs an AMD card. At first that meant Radeon RX 9000 on RDNA 4 only, but in July 2026 AMD opened FSR 4.1 upscaling to the RX 7000 series, and the RX 6000 series was promised for early 2027.
Why this matters more than it looks
Swapping upscalers existed before OptiScaler. It just looked different.
The builds that actually worked lived on Patreon, access cost money, updates arrived whenever the author felt like it, and nobody ever saw the source. You paid for a DLL you then dropped into your game folder, and you took it on trust. When the author lost interest the thing simply stopped being updated, and support for new FSR versions died with it.
The project is blunt about this. OptiScaler is free, it lives on GitHub under the GPL-3.0 licence, and the authors call any demand for money a scam.
The difference is not only the price. Open source means anyone can look at what is being injected into your rendering pipeline, not just the person you sent money to. For a mod that hooks into the graphics stack, that is the whole point.
How to install it
This is not a mod manager job. You copy files into the game folder by hand. It sounds worse than it is: the whole thing takes about three minutes.
Option one, the script
- Download the latest stable build from the releases page on GitHub. No other source.
- Find the folder with the game executable. Not the install root, the folder where the exe actually sits. On Unreal Engine games the path usually looks like
Game\Binaries\Win64. - Extract everything from the archive into that folder.
- Run the
setup.batthat matches your graphics card, there is one each for Nvidia, AMD and Intel. - The script asks whether to use DLSS inputs. On AMD and Intel cards, say yes. It may offer to download OptiPatcher as well, accept that too.
- Done. If a renamed DLL and a file called
OptiScaler.inihave appeared in the folder, the install worked.
Option two, by hand
One step differs: you rename OptiScaler.dll yourself. Pick a name from the list the game will definitely load:
dxgi.dll, winmm.dll, d3d12.dll, dbghelp.dll, version.dll, wininet.dll, winhttp.dll or OptiScaler.asi.
Where to start. The authors suggest dxgi.dll, which works for most games. If nothing happens, try the next name on the list. Leave OptiScaler.ini alone, it has to keep that exact name.
One special case: the game supports FSR 2 or 3 only and has no DLSS at all. Then you also need nvngx_dlss.dll, taken from TechPowerUp or the Streamline SDK repository, placed alongside it and with the copy renamed to nvngx.dll.
Controls in the game
- Insert. Opens the settings panel on top of the game. If the panel flickers and disappears, try Alt plus Insert, that fixes it on some keyboard layouts.
- Page Up. Shows the performance counter. Page Down cycles through its modes.
- End. Turns frame generation on and off.
How to remove it
Delete the renamed DLL and OptiScaler.ini from the game folder. Nothing is left behind. That is probably the strongest argument for trying it at all: rolling back takes ten seconds.
Two warnings that matter more than anything else here
- Do not put this in online games. Anti-cheat sees library injection and reacts the only way it knows, with a ban. The authors put this in the first line of the project description, and they mean it.
- The project has no website of its own. None. There is GitHub, there is Discord, there is a NexusMods page. Everything else a search for optiscaler turns up, including polished sites with a download button, has nothing to do with the developers.
Read that second one twice. A mod that goes into your game folder and loads with the game is a perfect wrapper for anything at all. Downloading that from a random website is not worth the curiosity.
Where the project lives
- GitHub. github.com/optiscaler/OptiScaler. Source, releases and a wiki with per game compatibility tables.
- Discord. The official server. The fastest place to find out why a particular game refuses to pick the mod up.
- NexusMods. The third legitimate source of builds.
The wiki keeps a separate list of games with FSR 4 confirmed working. Worth a look before you start: some titles need a non standard filename or an extra step.
A personal note
Free mods usually come with enthusiasm and an abandoned repository six months later. This one is different. The project keeps moving, FSR 4 support landed faster than some studios shipped official patches, and the neighbouring pieces like Nukem's dlssg-to-fsr3 and FakeNvapi were simply folded in, so nobody has to assemble a stack of four mods any more.
The result is a slightly odd and very welcome situation: the community hands a Radeon owner what neither the game publisher nor the GPU vendor will. For free, with the source open, after several years of paid wrappers of unclear quality.
So thanks to the team and to everyone sending patches. May the project last, may the list of supported games keep growing, and may the authors keep the energy for it. If it helped you, there are support buttons on the GitHub page, and that is the most direct way to say thank you.
Before you install OptiScaler, check whether your game is on the official list: FSR 4 may switch on without any of this. The list and the requirements are in FSR 4 and Redstone: every supported game.
