I moved one thing in DLSS 5's pipeline, and it gave me back 50% of my frame rate

Published Sep 29, 2026, 11:30 AM EDT Gaming has been Samarveer’s greatest passion, and the Literature graduate in him takes immense joy in dissecting games for their themes, messages, and impact. Samarveer holds a deep appreciation of gaming, and considers the platform to be the most immersive and impactful across all media. He can be found engaging with gaming communities online, always ready to debate the finer points of ray tracing or itching to write an 8-page collegiate thesis on any game that impacts him emotionally. Officially speaking, Nvidia's DLSS 5 Neural Rendering is exclusive to RTX 50-series cards and games that support DLSS 5 natively. However, just a week after its release, modders got their hands on the DLSS 5 neural rendering files before injecting them into every game they could. I've spent the last couple of weeks throwing DLSS 5 at my PS2 and PS3 games, and the visual upgrade has been ridiculous. However, injecting DLSS 5 into modern AAA games, especially on a 3-year-old card like the RTX 4070 Ti, has been gutting my frame rate every single time. Thankfully, I came across a deceptively simple option buried among OptiScaler's impressive collection of DLSS 5 tweaks. With a single click, I've changed just how expensive Neural Rendering is on my GPU, with barely any loss in image quality. My RTX 4070 Ti struggles to keep up with DLSS 5 Getting Neural Rendering running is actually the easy part Thanks to multiple tools and an unending slew of YouTube tutorials, getting DLSS 5 running in an unsupported game is surprisingly straightforward now. I used OptiScaler alongside RenoDX, dropped in the appropriate Neural Rendering DLL, and after a little configuration, I had Neural Rendering working on The Blood of Dawnwalker and even the 2023 Dead Space remake. Neither game natively supports DLSS 5, but visually, the difference was impossible not to notice. Lighting, reflections, skin, and environmental detail all took on that unmistakable Neural Rendering look straight out of the uncanny valley. The problem, however, came in the form of stutters and frame drops, because my GPU struggled to keep up with the newer, prettier pixels. At my usual 1440p High settings in The Blood of Dawnwalker — the latest taxing Unreal Engine 5 game — I comfortably get triple-digit frame rates while running DLSS Balanced, but enabling DLSS 5's Neural Rendering changed those numbers dramatically, to say the least. RTX 4070 Ti + Ryzen 5 7600X + 32GB DDR5 | 1440p Game Metric Native DLSS 4.5 Balanced DLSS 5 Neural Rendering DLSS 5 Performance Drop The Blood of Dawnwalker (High) Avg. FPS 67 FPS 106 FPS 54 FPS ~49.1% 1% Low FPS 46 FPS 74 FPS 48 FPS VRAM Usage 8.0 GB 7.5 GB 8.4 GB Game Metric Native DLSS 4.5 Balanced DLSS 5 Neural Rendering DLSS 5 Performance Drop Black Myth: Wukong (High) Avg. FPS 73 FPS 119 FPS 57 FPS ~52.1% 1% Low FPS 66 FPS 107 FPS 49 FPS VRAM Usage 7.4 GB 7.0 GB 7.7GB This kind of performance hit is genuinely difficult to ignore, especially when you're starting with a three-digit FPS. Of course, it also brought me below 60fps, which, on a game I reached nearly 200FPS on with multi-frame generation (also with OptiScaler), was something I struggled to digest. My 4070 Ti was getting absolutely demolished with Neural Rendering turned on, with the GPU pinned to its limits and even a couple of outright crashes during testing when I tried turning on Frame Generation. DLSS 5 looked fantastic, but I was effectively trading away a huge chunk of the performance I'd spent good money on the GPU to get. There is, after all, a difference between a slight "performance hit" and watching my frame rate be butchered by a single feature. I moved the Neural Rendering layer's position in the pipeline A single tweak completely changed DLSS 5's usability We know upscaling renders a lower-resolution frame first, then upscales it to the final resolution (1440p in this case). As such, when DLSS 5 has to apply the neural rendering layer on the already-upscaled image with 1440 pixels, it demands a cost that older and weaker cards struggle to pay. Thankfully, OptiScaler offers a feature where I can ask it to apply the Neural Rendering layer before upscaling, so DLSS 5 can work on the lower-resolution frame first before reconstructing the final image to the target resolution. The difference was absolutely immediate. In Dawnwalker, DLSS 5 performance jumped by 50%, while in Black Myth: Wukong, it jumped around 47%. RTX 4070 Ti + Ryzen 5 7600X + 32GB DDR5 RAM | 1440p Game DLSS 5 (after Super Resolution) DLSS 5 (before Super Resolution) Performance Jump The Blood of Dawnwalker (High) 54 FPS 81 FPS ~50% Black Myth: Wukong (High) 57 FPS 84 FPS ~47% The reason is straightforward. At 1440p, DLSS Super Resolution renders the game at a resolution below native. Running Neural Rendering before that upscale means the neural model has fewer pixels to process. It does the expensive work on a smaller image, then Super Resolution simply handles the trip back to my 1440p display. I didn't use DLSS Frame Generation in any of the aforementioned benchmarks. Of course, there is indeed a quality trade-off, and I can see it when comparing the two DLSS 5 modes closely. Pre-SR Neural Rendering isn't quite as pristine, but it still offers an enormous visual jump over vanilla rendering. Suddenly, with a single feature on OptiScaler, DLSS 5 felt playable instead of merely experimental. OptiScaler is making DLSS 5 far more interesting It's genuinely impressive how OptiScaler now isn't about injecting DLSS 5 into games that never supported it. Now, its developers and growing collection of forks are actively figuring out how to make Neural Rendering more practical, experimenting with where it runs, how it runs, and how much of a performance cost it demands. That truly does matter, because as is evident, DLSS 5 isn't necessarily some fixed tax we have to accept. Moving Neural Rendering before Super Resolution recovers a huge chunk of my frame rate, and it also keeps most of the visual transformation that makes DLSS 5 so alluring in the first place. In fact, there are already experiments going further, including multi-pass approaches and efforts to get Neural Rendering working on AMD graphics cards, too. Even on OptiScaler right now, there are experimental features that aim to render the Neural Rendering layer before SR, but apply it after — it doesn't work well at all right now, though. OptiScaler DLSS 5 is becoming a playground for PC gamers The bigger point here is that Nvidia may have created DLSS 5, but the PC modding community is already treating it like a playground. Every new fork, tweak, and pipeline experiment takes DLSS 5 from experimental space to something you can genuinely leave enabled. Whether it's "the future of PC graphics" or the "death knell of artistic creativity" is yet to be seen. Regardless, DLSS 5 remains opt-in, meaning users can choose to use the experimental tech if they wish. Now more than ever, though, the methods, tools, tweaks, and options at users' disposal are spoiling us for choice.