DLSS 3 Mod for Elden Ring Is Out Now, Delivering Substantial Performance Increase

As promised a few days ago, following the earlier issues encountered while implementing DLSS Frame Generation into Elden Ring, modder PureDark has now released the DLSS 3 mod for his Patreon backers.

Thanks to PureDark, I could briefly test the new version of the Elden Ring upscaler. The DLSS 3 mod comes wrapped in a ReShade package that now also includes the sharpening filter AMD FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS). You can now use that to regulate sharpening, whereas you had to add a sharpening shader of your own with the previous version of the upscaler that only featured DLSS Super Resolution. Of course, you’re still free to disable FidelityFX CAS and use another ReShade sharpening filter, such as Marty’s DELC Sharpen (now renamed iMMERSE Sharpen).

The DLSS 3 mod provides a further boost to performance for owners of NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 40 Series graphic cards. With my RTX 4090 and i7 12700KF, in the game’s initial location, the average frame rate improved from 88 to 120.6 FPS, a 37% uplift. Interestingly, the 1% percentile differential was far larger, jumping from 54.1 to 90.5 FPS, or a 67.2% increase. The 0.2% percentile frame rate recorded by CapFrameX was more in line with the average frame rate in terms of improvement, upping FPS from 38.5 to 55.5, a 44.1% boost. Still, it was enough to nearly bring even the lowest instances to 60FPS.

That is, of course, at 4K resolution with maxed settings (ray tracing included) and DLSS Super Resolution set to Quality mode via the upscaler. There are no visible artifacts caused by Frame Generation, either.

With this DLSS 3 mod, there’s plenty of performance headroom for RTX 40 owners to play Elden Ring with the taxing ray tracing option and even add some texture mods to further improve the look of FromSoftware’s open world action RPG masterpiece.

As you can see in the footage below, the ReShade menu includes several adjustable settings, such as mipmap LOD bias, whether or not High Dynamic Range (HDR) should be enabled, the NVIDIA Reflex setting (basic or boost), and even a Reflex FPS cap.

The industrious PureDark isn’t just working on Elden Ring, anyway. A few hours ago, he released the DLSS 3 mod for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, which was previously shown doubling that game’s frame rate. However, PureDark couldn’t switch the built-in AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.1 to DLSS Super Resolution yet. As such, he warns there may be issues at this stage, as Frame Generation was never meant to work on top of FidelityFX Super Resolution. Additionally, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor’s version of FSR2 leads to blurry graphics, though that doesn’t have anything to do with the mod.

PureDark also released a new version of his first DLSS 3 mod, which he made for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim while trying to assess how to improve his Elden Ring project.