DLSS in Almost Any Game: Turn It On, Update It, Add It Where There Is None

"How do I get DLSS in this game" is really four different questions, and people mix them up constantly. One person already has DLSS, it is just an old build that smears. Another only has FSR in the menu. A third is playing something from 2015 that has nothing at all. The answers are nothing alike: two minutes in the NVIDIA app for one, dropping a file into a folder by hand for another, and in one case there is no answer.

Below are all the routes that actually work, what each one needs, where each one breaks, and where using it will get you banned. Start by working out which case you are in, or you will spend half a day on the one that was never going to help.

Work out which case you are in first

Open the graphics settings in the game and look at what is in the upscaler list. Everything else follows from that.

That last row is the "almost" in the title. DLSS needs motion vectors and a depth buffer from the engine. If the game hands those to nobody, there is nowhere to get them, and no tool works around that. Everything offered in that situation runs off the finished image and has nothing to do with DLSS.

Case one: the game has DLSS. It is all done in the NVIDIA app

This is the common case and the easy one. If a game supports DLSS 2.0 or newer, the NVIDIA app will swap in the current model for you without a single file being touched. More than four hundred games are covered this way right now.

For most people that is the job finished. Recommended is not a placeholder either, it is a specific mapping from NVIDIA: preset M on Performance mode, preset L on Ultra Performance, preset K on everything else.

If you want to drive it yourself, switch Model Presets to Custom. Whatever you pick then applies to every DLSS mode.

A word about older cards, and it needs to be an honest one. Models M and L run on every RTX going back to the 20 series, but on RTX 20 and 30 they cost noticeably more frames: those chips have no hardware FP8, so the maths is done the long way. On a 2060 you are often better off staying on preset K and keeping the frames.

The third entry, Super Resolution Mode, earns its place on its own: it turns on DLAA in games where the developer never exposed it. DLAA is the same algorithm without the resolution drop, pure anti-aliasing. If you have frames to spare it is the best thing one checkbox can do for an image.

What you need going in: NVIDIA app 11.0.6 or newer and the Game Ready 591.74 WHQL driver, which is what models M and L arrived with on 5 January 2026. The second generation Ray Reconstruction that NVIDIA opened up on 25 August lives in the same menu behind an Early Access tick, and we went through it separately.

Case two: DLSS is there but the app cannot see the game. Swap the file

The NVIDIA app does not know every game in existence. Odd launchers, early access builds, portable copies: in all of those the game may simply not show up in the Graphics list. That leaves the old method, replacing the library in the game folder.

The file is called nvngx_dlss.dll and it sits next to the game executable or in an engine subfolder. The current build is 310.7.129. Frame generation has its own library, nvngx_dlssg.dll, currently 310.7.128. Both live on TechPowerUp, where the date of each build is visible.

You do not have to do it by hand. DLSS Swapper is free, finds your installed games itself, shows the library version in each one and swaps it in two clicks. The current release is 1.2.6.1 from 26 August 2026, which added preset F for Ray Reconstruction. Its real virtue is the backup it keeps: rolling back is the same two clicks.

One thing that generates a lot of "it stopped working" posts. A game update drops its own copy of the library over yours, and verifying game files in Steam does exactly the same. That is not a fault, that is the design. After a big patch you redo the swap, and the reason DLSS Swapper is worth having is that redoing it is cheap.

Read next

OptiScaler: how to get FSR 4 into a game that never shipped it

Lossless Scaling: frame generation in any game, and how to run it on a Steam Deck

Case three: the game only has FSR or XeSS. This is where OptiScaler comes in

Here the actual work starts. OptiScaler is a shim: it intercepts the game's calls to its own upscaler and hands them to a different one. The game thinks it is rendering through FSR while DLSS is the thing assembling the frame.

It has exactly one limitation and it decides everything. The game must already support DLSS 2+, FSR 2+ or XeSS. OptiScaler cannot conjure an upscaler out of nothing, because there would be nothing to intercept.

And one step that other guides keep losing. If the game never had DLSS, there is no DLSS library in its folder either. You put nvngx_dlss.dll there yourself, next to OptiScaler, taken from the same TechPowerUp page. Skip it and the overlay simply has no DLSS line, and people spend an hour convinced they installed something wrong.

Unreal Engine needs a caveat. The XeSS plugin in that engine does not provide depth, so replacing in-game XeSS breaks the other upscalers, and the authors say plainly that XeSS is the only input that reliably works there. FSR inputs in UE games often need ini edits, and at that point you are troubleshooting one specific game rather than the tool.

We DO NOT HAVE an official website. We DON'T have an official manager app. Only LEGIT places are this Github, our Discord server and Nitec's NexusMods page. OptiScaler is FREE, any kind of monetary requirements are scams.

That warning sits at the very top of the project's documentation and it is not decoration. Search for "optiscaler download" and you get several sites dressed up as official, complete with a Download button and their own "manager". Get it from the releases page on GitHub. The current stable build is 0.9.4 from 18 July 2026, and since 0.9 the archive already bundles Fakenvapi and Nukem's mod, so there is nothing extra to hunt down.

Where you must not do any of this

The shortest and most important part of this guide. In the OptiScaler docs this is the only thing formatted as a warning: do not use it with online games, it may trigger anti-cheat and get you banned.

The mechanism is simple and not up for debate. Kernel level anti-cheats like Easy Anti-Cheat, BattlEye and Vanguard watch which libraries the game process loads. A dxgi.dll that did not ship with the game is not an upscaler to them, it is foreign code inside a protected process. Nobody is going to work out that you only wanted a cleaner image, and appeals over injection bans tend to be short.

The practical rule: in a multiplayer game, use the NVIDIA app and nothing else. It puts nothing in the game folder and works through the driver, so there is nothing for an anti-cheat to catch. Swapping nvngx_dlss.dll sits somewhere in between, since the file is legitimate and signed, but it is still replacing a game file and I would not do it in a competitive shooter.

How to confirm it is actually running

"It looks sharper, I think" is worth nothing. There are two ways to look at facts instead.

The easy one: press Alt + Z in game, open Statistics, and under Statistics View select DLSS. A panel appears in the corner showing the version and the active presets, including anything you set through Override.

The thorough one, and the only one that works for OptiScaler and swapped libraries: turn on NVIDIA's own indicator through the registry. Under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\NGXCore create a DWORD called ShowDlssIndicator with a decimal value of 1024. A line appears in the bottom left of the screen with the library version, the mode, the render resolution, the output resolution and the preset letter.

The number to read is the render resolution. Pick Quality at 4K and it should say 2560x1440. If it says 3840x2160, the upscaler is not running, whatever the game menu claims.

If it did not work

The short version of the priorities: try the NVIDIA app first, because it is free, reversible and safe. Reach for OptiScaler only when the game genuinely has no DLSS in its menu, and only in a single player game. And a game with no upscaler at all cannot be given DLSS by anyone, so if someone promises otherwise they are selling you something else under a name you recognise.