HelixSR Mod Brings DLSS Upscaling to AMD Handhelds

Developer lonewolf0622 released HelixSR on GitHub two days ago, a drop-in replacement for AMD's FSR 3.1 upscaler on Direct3D 12 that runs Nvidia's DLSS neural network on AMD GPUs. According to wccftech.com, the mod uses Preset E, the final CNN-based model introduced with DLSS 3.7, and runs as plain DirectX 12 compute shaders without requiring an Nvidia driver, CUDA, or ROCm. It also works on Linux through Proton and vkd3d-proton.

Early tests show performance gains over AMD's FSR 4. One ResetEra user measured approximately 3.5 ms per frame for HelixSR at 800p, compared to 4.5 ms for FSR 4. On the BC-250, Hitman: World of Assassination ran at 4K at 35 FPS with the DLSS Quality preset, versus 17 FPS with FSR 4.

Handheld results are also notable. YouTuber BlackHeart909 reported 34 to 40 FPS in Pragmata on the Steam Deck in Performance mode, and 35 to 40 FPS in Control Resonant on the ROG Ally X at 1080p. Dropping the Ally X's output to 720p allowed a locked 60 FPS.

Since release, the developer has pushed out five updates, adding a single-file installer, a Quality Super-Sampled Mode (QSSM), and a fix for blurry image on RDNA 3 GPUs under Windows. HelixSR supports Direct3D 12 games only, with no Vulkan support; games not using FSR 3.1 require OptiScaler.

Background

DLSS 3.7 was the final CNN-based model before Nvidia switched to Transformer models with DLSS 4. AMD's FSR 4 is officially limited to RDNA 4 GPUs, leaving RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 handhelds with FSR 3. Community workarounds can get FSR 4 running on older devices but at a steep performance cost.