Unofficial DLSS 5 Neural Rendering Mod for AMD Radeon Gains 74% in a Day

Nvidia released DLSS 5 Neural Rendering earlier this month for RTX 50-series GPU owners. Now an unofficial GitHub project called DLSS-NR-on-AMD is trying to run the same neural rendering technology on AMD Radeon RX 9000 and RX 7000 series GPUs by reimplementing the neural network runtime for AMD GPU architectures.

The project currently works with DirectX 12 games that use FSR. Tested titles include Cyberpunk 2077 and GTA V Enhanced. In one test, Cyberpunk 2077 ran at over 80 FPS on a Radeon RX 9070 XT without DLSS 5 Neural Rendering, but enabling the unofficial implementation dropped performance by around 11-12 FPS.

Development has moved quickly. Alpha 0.3.3 claimed a 23% performance improvement, and Alpha 0.4.0 reportedly added another 42% over version 0.3.3, amounting to roughly a 74% improvement in 24 hours. At 3440 x 1440 resolution, the Alpha 0.4.0 build reached around 50 FPS in Cyberpunk 2077, while the earlier build achieved roughly 30 FPS in the same test.

An AMDNR launcher automates much of the setup process, removing the need to manually copy and replace DLL files per game. It supports different runtimes and offers options through the OptiScaler interface.

The project remains in alpha, so performance and compatibility can vary by game and GPU. The developer told Ancient Gameplays they are working on another major update expected to bring a substantial performance boost on Radeon GPUs. Tom's Hardware reported on the project's progress.