AMD Radeon Runs DLSS 5 via Mod, Gains 74% Performance

Imagine firing up Cyberpunk 2077 on an AMD Radeon card and getting DLSS 5 magic. That's exactly what one modder is making possible.

According to Respawnfirst, a mod project that lets AMD Radeon GPUs run Nvidia's DLSS 5 neural rendering tech has rolled out two updates in the past 24 hours, delivering a massive performance boost. DLSS 5, if you haven't been keeping up, is Nvidia's latest image-generation tech that uses neural networks to supercharge lighting, reflections, and overall visual fidelity in games. The catch? It's computationally heavy, so even native GeForce cards feel the strain.

Since AMD Radeon GPUs don't natively support DLSS 5, this mod relies on a translation layer to get things running. Early versions had obvious performance bottlenecks. But developer Daniel has been hard at work optimizing, and the results are impressive.

Here's the breakdown: Alpha 0.3.3 added a graphical installer and overlay settings, while also boosting performance by about 23% over the previous version. Then Alpha 0.4.0 came along and squeezed out another 42% improvement on top of that. Stack those up and you're looking at a 74% total gain.

In testing by the tech channel Ancient Gameplays, an AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT running Cyberpunk 2077 at 3440x1440 hit around 50 FPS with the latest version. That's not too shabby for a card that isn't supposed to support DLSS 5 at all.

Now, a quick reality check: these numbers come from the mod developer and third-party testers, and the project is still in Alpha. It's not an official Nvidia solution for AMD platforms. Daniel says more performance optimizations are on the way.

This isn't the only fan-driven effort to expand DLSS compatibility. The modding community has also tried getting DLSS 5's multi-frame generation and other new features running on older Nvidia cards. These projects are slowly chipping away at hardware limitations, bringing cutting-edge features to more GPUs.

For now, DLSS 5 on AMD Radeon remains an unofficial mod, so your mileage may vary depending on your GPU, the game, and your settings. Still, it's a promising glimpse of what's possible when the community refuses to take 'unsupported' for an answer.

Would you try this mod on your AMD card, or are you waiting for an official solution? Let us know in the comments!