DLSS 5 Has Been Run on a Radeon RX 9070 XT. It Works, at 28 fps in 1080p

On 3 September a project appeared on GitHub with a one line description: "Run DLSS 5 Neural Rendering on your AMD GPU. Magic!". Within a day it had over three hundred stars, and it runs on a Radeon RX 9070 XT.

The important part first, so nobody gets their hopes up: 28 frames per second at 1080p. The author states that himself, in the first paragraph of the description. Here is how he did it, what it costs and what follows from it.

What was actually built

The project is called DLSS-NR on AMD and the author goes by danielblnc. The goal is stated plainly: make DLSS 5 neural rendering run on Radeon RX 9000 cards of the RDNA 4 generation, in any DirectX 12 game that has FSR.

The idea behind it is elegant. DLSS 5 hooks upscaler calls, and this shim feeds it FSR calls instead of the ones it expects. The game thinks it is rendering through FSR, the AMD card does the honest work, and NVIDIA's neural model assembles the result. Tested on Cyberpunk 2077 and GTA V Enhanced.

The project is alive in the literal sense: the author shipped more than a dozen builds in the first day, and the latest at the time of writing is alpha 0.2.10.

How it is installed

The overlay exposes mode (inline or async, the second one for photo mode only), tone intensity, structure intensity and skin structure as a separate slider. Model selection is promised later.

What it costs in frames

This is where the real story sits, and it is far more honest than the headlines.

28 frames per second at 1080p on an RX 9070 XT. That is a card which, in the same games without any neural rendering, delivers three times as much at a higher resolution. The author calls performance a work in progress and sets himself the goal of matching an RTX 5070 Ti.

On image quality his own assessment is more restrained than the write-ups: the output is very similar to official DLSS, though some effects are not working at one hundred percent.

So as of today this is not a way to play, it is proof that it can be done at all. Proof that is one day old, at that, and the number 28 will almost certainly move.

Read next

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DLSS 5 Leaked and Now Runs Everywhere, Even on PS2 Games. Where It Worked and Where It Died

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

What it needs and what it will not do

He has written out the legal side too: the project is not affiliated with NVIDIA or AMD, contains no NVIDIA code, and requires the user to bring their own legitimately obtained copy of the library. Carefully worded, but the library in question escaped from an NBA 2K27 build, which makes the legitimacy of most people's copy rather theoretical.

What follows from this

Officially nothing has changed: DLSS is still NVIDIA's technology and it runs on NVIDIA cards. In our guide to getting DLSS into any game that condition comes first, and it has not moved.

But in a little over a week the leaked library has been run on four generations of NVIDIA cards, in DirectX 9 games, inside a PlayStation 2 emulator, and now on a competitor's hardware. Slowly every time, with caveats every time, and every time it breaks another explanation of why this officially cannot be done.

I would not go and install it right now: 28 frames is not a game, and the library has to be sourced from somewhere. Worth watching, though, because if the author gets even halfway to his stated goal, the conversation about who gets DLSS 5 becomes a very different one.