DLSS 5 foveated-rendering mods claim near-double performance, unverified
Tom's Hardware reports that two community projects now apply foveated rendering to DLSS 5 Neural Rendering: maximedgoulet's Foveated DLSS5, a ReShade add-on, and ClarkCheekyKent's CheekyFoveatedDLSS, a standalone integration. Rather than changing image resolution, the mods vary the level of detail in DLSS 5 Neural Rendering, keeping the centre of the frame at full quality while reducing detail toward the edges; users can set the centre region's width and height independently and adjust the fall-off rate. The reported speed-up rests on a self-reported Reddit measurement of 48 to 80 FPS in The Witcher 3 at 7680x2160 on an RTX 4090, which Tom's Hardware cites without independent verification.
Modders are already reshaping how DLSS 5 Neural Rendering spends GPU time, an early sign of community tuning around Nvidia's AI rendering pipeline rather than only game-level support.
Popular graphics post-processing injector software ReShade, commonly used to mod DLSS 5 into unsupported games, now has a foveated imaging add-on, including another standalone project that doesn't need precursor software, allowing DLSS 5 to affect only what's in view, reducing GPU load and increasing FPS.
Foveated imaging is nothing new; it's a technique that's been used in VR to increase performance. It works by only rendering what's in view, often increasing the resolution in the center and reducing it at the edges. Our eyes work in a similar way, with the clearest image in a small area in the center of your vision, blurring on the edges. With foveated rendering, you barely notice the lower-resolution edges as the peripheral vision is less concerned with fine details.
I made a foveated rendering mod for DLSS5 than can double performance by reducing the resolution inputs near the edges from r/DLSS
Instead of varying the resolution of the image, however, it varies the level of detail in DLSS 5 Neural Rendering. DLSS NR loads a whole AI model into your GPU and renders images in real time, making it a resource-intensive task; but the task is minimized greatly when most of the detail is only asked for in the middle of the image. That's what projects like maximedgoulet’s Foveated DLSS5 and ClarkCheekyKent’s CheekyFoveatedDLSS aim to do; with Foveated DLSS being a ReShade add-on and CheekyFoveatedDLSS capable of being a standalone integration.
#NVIDIA#DLSS 5 Neural Rendering#ReShade#Foveated DLSS5#CheekyFoveatedDLSS#The Witcher 3#RTX 4090#UEVR