How to install DLSS 5: a working guide and the five traps I walked into

This took me a whole day. Not because the instructions are hard — because every guide out there describes the happy path, where it works first try. When it does not, they go quiet.

What follows is the part they leave out. How to tell from the log exactly which step broke. Why half the people who try it end up with “I installed everything and nothing changed.” And why the most common reason for failure is not the mod at all, but one setting inside the game that nobody looks at.

Everything here was tested on my own machine: RTX 5070 Ti, driver 616.56. I got it running in two games, hit a wall in a third, and worked out exactly what the wall was.

Updated 6 September. DLSS 5 has shipped officially since I first wrote this. None of what follows is obsolete: exactly one game supports it, and there will be no “turn it on everywhere” switch in NVIDIA App — so everything else still gets it by hand. What changed is in the first two sections; further down, build versions are updated and measurements from the release build added.

What DLSS 5 is and why it still comes as a mod

DLSS 5 has shipped — on 3 September 2026, alongside the GeForce Game Ready 616.64 driver. Hold the celebration, though: exactly one game supports it officially, NBA 2K27, and it runs on RTX 50 only. RTX 40 support is promised later — NVIDIA says it is finishing the job on the 50 series first. RTX 20 and 30 are promised nothing at all.

And here is the part that matters: there will be no DLSS 5 switch in NVIDIA App. NVIDIA confirmed outright that enabling neural rendering is the game developer’s call, and that no “DLSS 5 Override” — the thing that exists for the upscaler — is coming. The announced list is long: Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Starfield, Hogwarts Legacy, Resident Evil Requiem, Oblivion Remastered, Phantom Blade Zero, NARAKA: BLADEPOINT and a dozen more. Not one of them has a date, and there is no Rockstar title and no Kingdom Come on it at all.

So nothing below has gone stale. If you want neural rendering anywhere other than NBA 2K27, you are installing it by hand. What people install is a 158 MB library, nvngx_dlssnr.dll, found in the early access build of that same NBA 2K27. It holds 148 million neural-network parameters. On its own it does nothing: it needs a middleman to grab the frame from the game and feed it to the model. That middleman is a ReShade add-on built by the community around the RenoDX project.

It matters what DLSS 5 actually does. This is not upscaling. Upscaling is DLSS 4 — it invents resolution. Neural rendering works on the finished frame instead, rebuilding lighting, materials and fine surface structure. It shows up most on faces and skin, which is where the main complaint about the technology comes from — the “beauty filter” charge: crank the intensity and characters turn waxy.

Two consequences to accept before you start:

• This is an unofficial build made from a leaked file. Not piracy in the legal sense, but not an NVIDIA release either. It is passed around through Discord and file hosts.
• It has no business in multiplayer. This injects third-party libraries into the game process. Anti-cheat sees that plainly, and the price is your account. Single player only.

The official release: what already works without mods

The shortest section here — purely so you do not go modding something that needs no mod.

• Driver — GeForce Game Ready 616.64 WHQL, dated 3 September. From NVIDIA App or the website.
• Game — NBA 2K27. Turn it on in Video Settings → DLSS Neural Rendering; mid-match it toggles with F9, which is the honest way to compare before and after on one scene.
• Card — any RTX 50, desktop or laptop. Failing that, GeForce NOW Ultimate, which runs on RTX 5080s.
• RTX 40 — promised, but later and with no date.

One number explains why the release happened at all: over six months NVIDIA made the model five times faster — from “you need two RTX 5090s” down to a single card anywhere in the line-up. That did not make it free (see the performance section), but it made it shippable.

And one observation from the first reviews: the official implementation is far gentler than the mod. The effect in NBA 2K27 is restrained next to what modders dial in elsewhere — no wax faces. If you have been judging the technology by “DLSS 5 ON/OFF” clips from mods, you have not been looking at what NVIDIA ships.

What you need

Four things. All of them go next to the game executable — and that is the first subtlety, because the executable is not always where you think.

File	What it is	Where to get it
ReShade 6.8.0 Addon	installs as dxgi.dll	reshade.me
renodx-dlss5.addon64	the add-on middleman	RenoDX Discord
nvngx_dlssnr.dll	the network itself, 158 MB	RenoDX Discord
nvngx_dlss.dll	upscaler, ideally a recent one	TechPowerUp

Read the ReShade line carefully. The site has two download buttons. You want the second one, marked with full add-on support. The regular build physically cannot load add-ons — it has no Add-ons tab at all. Every second person trips over this.

Driver: 616.56 or newer — that is what both the add-on and the OptiScaler fork require. For official DLSS 5 in NBA 2K27 you need 616.64. On anything older the network either refuses to start or crashes the game.

Installing it in a game that already has DLSS

The base case is a modern DirectX 12 game that already offers DLSS in its settings. I will use Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, because that is where I collected the full set of traps.

Step 1. Find the real executable. In KCD2 it is not in the root but in Bin\Win64MasterMasterSteamPGO\KingdomCome.exe. It is all of 1.5 MB — a thin shim, with the whole renderer sitting in WHGame.dll next door at 85 MB. That is why the automatic DLSS 5 installers refused to touch the game: they read the executable’s import table, found no DirectX in it, and announced that there was no game here. The main one has since been rewritten (more on that below), but keep the habit of checking which file actually renders — it pays off in any game with a thin launcher.

Step 2. Install ReShade. Point it at that executable, pick Direct3D 12. Shader packages and bundled add-ons — clear every checkbox, you need none of them.

Step 3. Drop the files in. The add-on and nvngx_dlssnr.dll go next to the executable. If the game keeps its DLSS libraries somewhere else (in KCD2, Bin\Win64Shared), put the network in both places. It is large, but 158 MB twice will not ruin anyone, and it removes the question of where it gets picked up from.

Step 4. Turn DLSS on inside the game. Do not skip this — there is a whole section on it below.

Step 5. Launch, press Home, open the Add-ons tab and find the DLSS 5 Neural Rendering section. Tick the master switch, Enable DLSS Neural Rendering — it is off by default.

Then the sliders: start NR Intensity at 0.5, definitely turn on Automatic Mask (without it the model does not know where skin is on the frame), and cycle through NR Preset — those are three genuinely different model modes, and the difference between them is bigger than any slider gives you.

Checking the log

Here is the part no guide includes. Do not guess from the picture — read ReShade.log next to the executable. It answers “is it working” with no ambiguity.

Three lines that mean success:

signed DLSSNR 310.8.0 D3D12 runtime initialized
created inline NR resources 1280x720 -> 2560x1440 (upscaling)
inline feature 18 evaluation succeeded (count=60)

count climbs with every frame. If it climbs, the network really is running and everything left is tuning.

And three diagnoses when it is not:

What the log says	What it means
skipped an NGX evaluation with incompatible guide/output dimensions	the add-on sees DLSS but cannot work with how the game supplies its buffers. Change the add-on build
hooks installed, but no calls at all	DLSS is switched off inside the game
no Registered add-on line	wrong ReShade build, or the add-on file is misnamed

And separately, the line that scares people for nothing:

ERROR | Failed to find NVSDK_NGX_D3D12_EvaluateFeature_C

It is harmless. The add-on tries entry-point variants and latches onto the ordinary one a millisecond later. This line appears in a fully working setup too. I lost an hour to it.

Five traps I walked into

1. “Native” in the upscaler list means “off”

The most annoying and the most common. In the graphics settings you pick a technology (DLSS / FSR / XeSS), and next to it a quality mode. And that list contains Native.

Logic says: native resolution, maximum quality. In reality it means “upscaler disabled.” DLSS never runs, the network has nothing to intercept, and your whole pile of files sits there doing nothing.

I spent half a day debugging a setup that had been correct from the start. The log was silent, and the cause was one dropdown.

2. The graphics menu rewrites your settings every time you open it

Set a mode, leave the menu — and the game writes everything shown on screen into its profile, not just what you changed. Pop back in to check something else, and the upscaler mode has quietly reverted.

I caught this three times in a row before I started writing values straight into the profile file. If a setting “will not save,” this is almost certainly why, not the mod.

3. Borderless window ignores the game’s own resolution

A beautiful trap. The game settings say 2560×1440 and you are certain you are playing at 2K. In reality:

what Windows reports to apps:  2560x1440
what the GPU actually outputs: 3840x2160

The monitor is physically 4K and Windows display scaling is at 150%. In a borderless window the game takes the physical desktop resolution and ignores its own setting. Exclusive fullscreen fixes it.

Easy to verify: in PowerShell, Get-CimInstance Win32_VideoController reports the real GPU mode. If it disagrees with what you chose in the game, there is your answer to “why is this so slow.”

4. The network runs at output resolution, not render resolution

The key performance fact, and it is not obvious.

The DLSS mode decides what resolution the game draws at. Neural rendering works on the finished frame, so it runs at output resolution. Which leads somewhere unpleasant: switching DLSS from Quality to Performance makes the game cheaper but does not make the network cheaper.

Its only lever is output resolution. Going from 4K to 1440p gave me exactly 2.25× — exactly the ratio of pixel counts.

5. An outdated add-on build

This is what finally solved it. I fought for a day with a build that was three generations behind:

what the installers handed out    382 KB
the build that worked            1.62 MB   (V4.6)
current today                                v4.7

And I checked it by hash: a popular one-click installer had bundled byte for byte the same stale file I already had. Fresh builds live in the RenoDX Discord, in the pinned messages, and new ones land practically every day: in the five days after V4.6 started working for me, v4.7 shipped — and third-party overlays now hook into its settings.

The moment I installed the current one, it worked on the first launch, with no other change.

Older games with no DLSS

A different story. With no DLSS in the game there is nothing to intercept, so the base method does not apply.

The main wall is 32-bit versus 64-bit. The add-on and the network exist only as 64-bit code, while most old games are 32-bit, and a 32-bit process cannot load a 64-bit library.

Three ways around it:

• DLSS5-Feeder synthesises the data the network is missing — depth and motion vectors — through ReShade, and for 32-bit games it spawns a separate 64-bit helper process, passing textures between them through GPU memory. DirectX 9 titles add dgVoodoo2 on top, a wrapper that translates the game to DirectX 11.
• OptiScaler used to simply add DLSS to the game, after which the base method worked. Since late August there is a fork, OptiScaler_DLSSNR, that runs the network itself as a separate pass after the upscaler — no ReShade, no RenoDX add-on. By 3 September it covered DX12, DX11 through a bridge and native Vulkan, and it does things the add-on cannot: a model-resolution slider (it used to cap at 100%, now it goes above — up to 2× with a downscaler on the way out) and a frame hold, so you can compare before and after on genuinely the same frame. Install by extracting into the game folder and running setup_windows.bat; nvngx_dlssnr.dll is not included, you supply it.
• RTX Remix, if a compatibility mod exists for the game.

The last one gives the best result, and the best example is GTA IV. The gta4-rtx mod replaces the ancient renderer wholesale with a modern path-traced one, and the network sits on top of that natively. The community reckons it is just about the most DLSS 5-compatible game around — and it came out in 2008.

Two conditions: you need exactly version 1.2.0.59 (Complete Edition), and expect to become CPU-bound — the mod author says so plainly and ships batch files for pinning cores.

GTA IV: a route without ReShade

This one deserves its own section, because it works nothing like everything above. GTA IV needs neither ReShade nor the RenoDX add-on.

The gta4-rtx mod swaps the game’s ancient renderer for RTX Remix — and Remix is itself 64-bit, runs on Vulkan and supports DLSS 5 natively. No scaffolding required: drop nvngx_dlssnr.dll into the .trex folder next to NvRemixBridge.exe, and that is the whole job.

Remix brings the rest with it: nvngx_dlss.dll, nvngx_dlssd.dll (Ray Reconstruction, which we could not get in any other game) and nvngx_dlssg.dll.

Where the switch lives

First trap. Alt+X opens the simple menu, which holds only quality presets. Neural rendering lives in the second menu, and there are two ways in:

• press the Developer Settings Menu button inside the open menu;
• or put rtx.defaultToAdvancedUI = True in rtx.conf, and Alt+X will open the right one straight away.

From there: the Rendering tab → Post-Processing → Neural Uplift (DLSS-NR). The sliders mean the same as in the add-on: Intensity, Style (0–2), Local Tone Strength, Auto Mask. Hint Render Preset is pointless to touch — the runtime’s own description says it selects nothing on the 310.8 library.

Checking the log

Different log this time: rtx-remix\logs\remix-dxvk.log. Four lines mean success:

[DLSS-NR] Loaded .trex\nvngx_dlssnr.dll
[DLSS-NR] Caller check bypassed
[DLSS-NR] Snippet initialized
[DLSS-NR] Created the Neural Uplift feature (id 18, preset 0) at 3840x2160

The second line is the interesting one. The library carries an internal caller check: it looks at which module the call came from and turns away strangers. Remix presents itself as nvngx.dll and gets through. If that fails for you, there is an explicit switch, rtx.neuralUplift.bypassCallerCheck.

Three traps you get nowhere else

1. Windows Defender eats the mod. a_gta4-rtx.asi is a library loaded by an injector, and antivirus flags it for the method rather than the content. Twice, in fact: the installer puts it back, Defender takes it again. From outside it looks like “the mod installed but nothing works.” Fixed with a folder exclusion, or by restoring the file from quarantine in the protection history.

2. The frame limiter stays silent until you flip a mode. The FusionFix fork has FpsLimit in GTAIV.EFLC.FusionFix.ini, but its own comment says the value is read only when the in-game menu is set to Custom. On anything else the file is ignored, and you sit there adjusting a setting that does nothing.

A frame cap matters more here than anywhere: path tracing takes the whole GPU, and a cap is the only way to free headroom without giving up image quality.

3. OBS cannot see the game. The window belongs to GTAIV.exe while the frames are produced by NvRemixBridge.exe, so game capture hooks the wrong process. On top of that, exclusive fullscreen never appears in the window list at all. What works: display capture, or dropping the game into windowed mode with Alt+Enter.

What not to expect

Characters stay angular. The replacement packages cover vehicles, lights, effects and world props — Remix cannot replace skinned meshes, the ones that bend with a skeleton. Up close you see honest 2008 geometry, and path tracing only emphasises every facet with sharp light. Neither DLSS 5 nor the high-poly model packs fix this: those are about props, not people.

GTA V Enhanced: BattlEye and the red banner

Two specific obstacles here, both of which cost me time.

BattlEye blocks dxgi.dll from loading. The launcher log shows a “blocked loading of file” line and ReShade simply never starts. The fix is the -nobattleye launch option in the game’s Steam properties. After that the game will not let you into Online, which is honestly a safety feature: you must not go in there with an injector running.

The red “unable to save configuration” banner. It sits over the picture for the whole session and advises checking file permissions. That advice is wrong — permissions have nothing to do with it.

GTA creates two ReShade runtimes in one process, one for the mode-select screen and one for the game. They share a single ReShade.ini, and whichever loses the race cannot claim it and prints the complaint on screen. I went through permissions, attributes, relative and absolute paths, splitting the configs into separate files, the proxy library name, the runtime-sync add-on, a ReShade reinstall, Defender’s folder protection and BattlEye. Nothing.

It cannot be fixed from outside. The cause is inside ReShade itself and there is no setting to silence the message. It does not affect the network at all — it just sits there annoying you.

Performance and streaming

Be ready for this to be expensive. On the leaked build, community measurements put the hit at 40–45% of your performance on an RTX 5090, with reports of 90 fps dropping to 29.

Now there are numbers from the release build too — NBA 2K27 on an RTX 5090, max settings with ray tracing:

Resolution	fps without / with DLSS 5	Cost
1080p	180 → 134	−26%
1440p	176 → 108	−39%
4K	— → 63	−50…60%

Watch how the cost climbs with resolution. That is exactly trap four: the network runs at the output resolution, so its price tracks pixel count, not the DLSS mode. (At 1080p the game is also CPU-bound — hence the near-identical 180 and 176 in the first column — so the real cost there is higher than 26%.)

On my 5070 Ti at 1440p with DLSS Quality it landed at 60 fps, capped by vsync, with the GPU at 97%.

And here is the separate misery for streamers. At 97% load there is nothing left for the encoder: NVENC lives on the same card and gets served last. The game looks smooth while the stream tears. A classic situation that is easy to blame on your connection.

What helps:

• Cap your frame rate and leave headroom. Aim for 85–90% load, not the ceiling.
• Turn the network off during broadcasts. Unpleasant but honest: right now DLSS 5 and streaming from one GPU do not mix.
• Lower the output resolution rather than the DLSS mode, for the reason in trap four above.

One practical note: in exclusive fullscreen, OBS needs Game Capture, not Display Capture — the latter can hand you a black screen.

Where to get fresh builds

The only place with current files is the RenoDX Discord. There is a #dlss5 channel whose pinned messages hold the add-on builds and patched libraries, a #dlss5-forum with threads for individual games, and #guides with ready recipes — Skyrim, Fallout 4, Witcher 3, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, Metal Gear Solid 4 and more.

Public installers and file-host bundles lag behind. I verified it: something advertised as an all-in-one package carried a three-day-old build, and in those three days two updates had shipped, one of which fixed my exact problem.

A caveat to the paragraph above

In a week that stopped being unconditionally true. DLSS5-Swapper, whose version 1.1.1 burned me on 30 August, was rewritten from scratch: by 4 September it had reached 2.2.1 and become a different tool — a library that finds your games across Steam, Epic, GOG and Xbox, DLSS5-Feeder built in for games without DLSS, emulator profiles (DuckStation, PCSX2, Dolphin, PPSSPP, Xenia), 32-bit DirectX 9/10/11, and an F8 overlay that drives the current RenoDX add-on’s settings from inside the game. The “it cannot see a game behind a thin launcher” complaint belongs to the old version.

The rule has not changed, only softened: look at the build date. Everything in this corner lives in weeks, and an all-in-one bundle older than three days will be stale again.

Separately: RTX 20, 30 and 40 need a patched nvngx_dlssnr.dll that replaces instructions those cards do not have. It is in the same pinned messages. On RTX 50, take the ordinary one.

What not to do

A short list of things I tried for nothing — save yourself an evening.

• Do not rename ReShade’s proxy library from dxgi.dll to d3d12.dll hoping to fix something. ReShade hooks every graphics API regardless of its own filename; the name only decides how Windows loads it.
• Do not borrow Streamline libraries from another game. The versions will not match, Streamline checks them, and it can fall over entirely — taking working DLSS with it.
• Do not chase Ray Reconstruction if the game does not support it. A lone nvngx_dlssd.dll with no engine support just sits in the folder.
• Do not switch off Enable Upscaling in the add-on to “clear the errors from the log.” That does not fix compatibility, it only silences the diagnostics — which makes things worse, because now you are blind.
• Do not wait for a toggle in NVIDIA App. It is not coming: NVIDIA confirmed that enabling neural rendering is up to the game developer. The upscaler has an Override; the network will not get one, however often you update the app.
• Do not go into multiplayer. Third time I have said it, because it is the only item on this list that costs money.

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The short version: assemble the kit, make sure DLSS is actually enabled in the game, read ReShade.log, and confirm your add-on build is current. Four things, and people skip three of them. And if the game you want it in is NBA 2K27, you need none of this: driver 616.64 and a toggle in the video settings.

Related on the site: what we know about GTA VI on PC — where I track the requirements and which technologies Rockstar has actually committed to.