A modder has crossed the streams between Nvidia and AMD, bringing DLSS Super Resolution to Radeon GPUs via a mod that you can download yourself right now. However, the project is still in an experimental phase and comes with plenty of caveats surrounding performance and graphics card support. Also, it doesn’t work on Windows.
Developer countervolts has published ‘d4r’ on GitHub, an initialism for ‘DLSS 4 Radeon’. In a nutshell, the mod uses the native nvngx_dlss.dll as a base, translating CUDA calls into instructions an AMD GPU can understand via the ZLUDA compatibility layer. A Wine bridge and some replacement kernels also play their part, making the process an unsurprisingly complicated one.
That Wine bridge highlights one of the key limitations of DLSS 4 Radeon, in that it only works via Linux with assistance from the Proton compatibility layer. This means there’s no Windows support, limiting the broad appeal of the mod in its current form. The modder doesn’t state if they’re working on a Windows compatible version, but there’s every chance another developer could build on this work in future.
Impressively, DLSS 4 Radeon supports the three major DLSS Super Resolution models, namely DLSS 3 (Model E), DLSS 4 (Model K), and DLSS 4.5 (Model M). Using a Radeon RX 7700 XT, countervolts has provided footage of the mod in action (above) as well as performance benchmarks for all versions, in addition to comparisons to FSR 4 in Silent Hill Townfall running at QHD.
Unsurprisingly, DLSS 3 proved the least intensive of Nvidia’s upscalers, delivering 72.4fps on average using its Quality preset. Meanwhile, DLSS 4 ran at 69.4fps and DLSS 4.5 hit 51.5fps. However, none of these frame rates were able to match FSR 4, with a 76fps average. These are the only test results that countervolts provides.
The mod requires RDNA 3 as a minimum, but it’s important to highlight that the Radeon RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 are likely to be the only other graphics cards capable of running DLSS 4 and 4.5 upscaling at full speed. This is because the kernels used for Navi 32 aren’t the same for Navi 33 or 31, leading to a loss in performance.
The developer could plug this RDNA 3 kernel gap in time, but it remains a limitation at the time of writing. Moreover, DLSS 4 Radeon doesn’t work on RDNA 4 nor RDNA 2 GPUs. It’s unclear whether it could in the future.
Regardless of DLSS 4 Radeon’s current limits, which should soften over time, this mod remains an impressive feat. As much as I laud the quality of AMD FSR 4.1, there are umpteen games stuck with FSR 2 or FSR 1 upscaling, which can’t enjoy an upscaling upgrade. A mod like this could circumvent this problem, and prove particularly beneficial to the Steam Machine with some extra work.
