DLSS-5 on AMD GPUs adds Nvidia-like AI upscaling, with caveats

The mod brings four Nvidia features to Radeon cards. Developer Daniel Blanco first released it on September 3, 2026, and back then it did just one thing: run DLSS 5 Neural Rendering. His version 0.8 update in mid-October added the rest of the set.

• Super Resolution: Nvidia’s upscaler, which renders a game at a lower resolution and rebuilds a sharper image, in its 4.5 version.
• Frame Generation: AI-made frames slotted between real ones to make motion look smoother.
• Ray Reconstruction: a denoiser that cleans up grainy ray-traced lighting and reflections.
• Neural Rendering: the headline DLSS 5 feature, where a generative AI model reworks each finished frame to improve lighting, fabric and faces.

The update also bundles its own copy of AMD’s FSR 4.1. Radeon cards already have FSR, but shipping one fixed version means the mod doesn’t have to cope with every game’s slightly different FSR setup.

AMD has its own answers for most of these tools, including FSR upscaling, frame generation and ray regeneration. The problem is that fewer games support them than support DLSS, and there is still nothing from AMD that matches Neural Rendering. That gap is exactly what Blanco set out to fill.

The mod works on Radeon RX 9000, RX 7000 and RX 6000 series cards, which use AMD’s RDNA 4, RDNA 3 and RDNA 2 designs. The first release only covered the two newest families; RX 6000 support came later.

On the game side, it needs a DirectX 12 title that already offers an upscaler, whether that is FSR, DLSS or Intel’s XeSS. Setup goes like this:

1. Download and run the NeuralHub mod loader, which scans your PC for compatible games.
2. Install the mod into the games it finds from the NeuralHub window.
3. Pick your DLSS settings for that game in NeuralHub.
4. Launch the game and switch on FSR, DLSS or XeSS in its graphics menu. The mod slips into that upscaler path and applies your choices.

An in-game overlay lets you change the DLSS settings without quitting to the desktop. Early versions also needed Windows 11, a recent Adrenalin graphics driver and a copy of Nvidia’s own Neural Rendering library file, so check the project page for the current list before you start.

It depends on who you ask. Blanco says the picture now looks very close to DLSS on an Nvidia card, apart from some effects that are not fully working yet. In his own tests, an RX 9070 XT ran at 90 to 100 FPS at 1080p.

That’s a big jump from the first release. Early on, the same card managed only around 33 FPS at 1080p with Neural Rendering on, which made the mod more of a curiosity than a way to play.

Players report mixed results with the newer build. Some say they lose no performance compared with plain FSR. Others report drops from a few frames per second up to 25% lower frame rates, depending on the game. With so many different PC setups out there, that spread isn’t surprising.

There’s a hardware reason, too. Nvidia cards have Tensor Cores, dedicated chips for the math AI models run on. RDNA 4 has no such units, so the work is borrowed from the card’s normal compute cores. Even on Nvidia’s own hardware, DLSS 5 is heavy: Nvidia puts its cost at 8 milliseconds per frame at 4K on an RTX 5090, and slower cards take longer. Blanco’s stated goal is to get an RX 9070 XT to perform like an RTX 5070 Ti.

For most people, this is a free experiment rather than a reason to change how they play. If you have a recent Radeon card and enjoy single-player games, it is a cheap way to see what Nvidia’s AI image tricks look like without buying a new GPU.

There are real risks to weigh first:

• Anti-cheat: the mod works by injecting a DLL, a small code library, into the game. Anti-cheat systems block that, and in online games such tampering can look like cheating, so keep it to single-player titles.
• Security warnings: at launch the source code wasn’t public and only a ready-made program was shared, which Windows Defender flagged. Install it at your own risk.
• Stability: crashes, visual glitches and slower performance are all possible, and swapping game files can make updates and support harder.
• No support: neither AMD nor Nvidia backs the project, so if something breaks, you’re on your own.

Blanco describes his work as a full rebuild of the neural network runtime for AMD chips, with no Nvidia code included. You still have to supply Nvidia’s own model file yourself, which is why the setup steps ask for it.

DLSS 5 arrived with NBA 2K27, initially only on GeForce RTX 50 cards. Modders quickly pulled the library out of that game’s early access version and added it to many others, and Nvidia has promised official RTX 40 support without giving a date.

Blanco says he is improving the AMD version daily. If you try it, start with one single-player game, compare the image and frame rate against plain FSR, and remove it if your game becomes unstable.