Those wrinkles ain't nothin' to be scared of (Patreon)

[As promised, I'm handing the mic over to Brandon so that he can tell us all about his adventures in DLSS 5 land. -Luke]

Welcome to the wild west of AI and computing VR gang!
As a fellow enthusiast, I have been trying all kinds of stuff the last few days. But I think it is best to try and keep things simple and stick with things that are likely to work. By all means, explore and try things. But please do not go off expecting any and all addons and new shiny Reshade shaders to load up and work. But they just might!

The main goal here was getting DLSS 5 to work alongside R.E.A.L. and Luke has accomplished that goal. As have a couple others and I'll point out one in particular later, but for now, let's focus on making the most of the compatibility that Luke worked hard to add in.
That starts with a huge shout out to Luke! Thank you for all the hours you poured in the last few days! So now we can replace the fake people we enjoy with versions that look a bit more like the real people we sometimes have to pretend we enjoy. 🦞a🦞! (Happy Lobsters)

Good news, I was able to finagle an NR-only version of the CheekyFoveatedDLSS.addon created by ClarkCheekyKent. It seems compatible with a bunch of DX12 games that R.E.A.L supports so far. So Huge shout out to Clark for creating it in the first place! Original can be found here: This one did work in a few games already!
ClarkCheekyKent/CheekyFoveatedDLSS

It is not yet compatible with BG3 because of DX11, but I will try to see if I can change that. Even on success, the results can vary depending on how DLSS 5 NR works with that particular game. For instance, in Spidey 2, indoor and night scenes are quite noisy and terrible. But those same dark scenes seem perfectly fine in HOGWARTS! It will not work currently with CD as it breaks the color. I don't think it really shines in that game anyways. But if I am able to make more games work or improve anything, I will update here and push another release. Speaking of releases, you can find my forked version at the bottom of this post.


What does it do? Well, it basically allows you to shrink the area that NR uses to a particular cropped area of effect. You can control the size and placement of that area. Allowing you to save a bunch of performance. Of course, that depends on the affected area you set. It defaults to 40% coverage. It also has all the other extra sliders you can get for DLSS NR control, including intensity, color, paper whites and so on. Plus, a scale slider to lower the working scale to save more fps. 75% is a pretty good spot for quality plus a bit more fps. There is also a transition width slider that you can adjust to make the transition between the cropped NR area and the rest not as dramatic. Setting that to something like .1 makes it easier to ignore. Again, the credit for all of that goes to Clark, I just finagled some stuff and stripped some stuff like SR out to make it compatible.

Install is super simple.
1. You must carefully follow Luke's previous post to get Reshade with addons installed alongside R.E.A.L.
2. You will need to disable the RenoDX addon. This one also applies NR, so you don't want both fighting. So, either just delete renodx-dlss5.addon64 or rename to renodx-dlss5.addon64.off, if you want to keep it so it doesn't get recognized by Reshade.
3. Download my build (link below), "SomewhatCheekyFoveatedDLSS.addon64" and drop it in the same game folder as R.E.A.L. and Reshade.

If it works with that particular game, it should be that simple. It will hopefully appear in the Reshade UI under addons. Again, it defaults to disabled, so you will need to open up the menu at the bottom of the Reshade UI and then enable it. Do not enable NR at high resolution starting out! Start low. Honestly, 50% seems like plenty of coverage to me and you can move the cropped area up or down a bit depending on where you tend to look most. This version should put the cropped area in the middle of your headset view pretty reliably as long as all the sliders are zeroed out. I added extra X and Y sliders because the cropped area started way up in the left eye for AFOP with the original version. But now that it's fixed, there are too many. So, another big shoutout to Clark for the addon and a shoutout to me for too many sliders. 🦞a🦞! (Happy Lobsters)

It seems that the more resolution and detail you give DLSS 5, the better it looks. Remember, you can also use R.E.A.L.'s FOV limiting sliders to increase the PPD value of a given resolution. That can work to your advantage here as well.

If I were to recommend a backup option to try for DLSS 5 NR support with R.E.A.L. I would go with Tig3r Mast3rs Optiscaler fork, which also allows the option of also using his OFXR bridge (only with OpenXR runtime). You get the same high compatibility rate of the Optiscaler route, and you can decide if the interpolation with higher latency is worth using or just leave that part off. I was able to use it and play at a pretty high resolution compared to just full NR.
This is the (modified) guide he posted for it:

1 - use dlss swapper and change dlss ingame to 310.5.3 or newer and enable preset M, and set DLSS Performance in-game (Not sure if you are stuck with only using that preset?)
2 - obtain a copy of the DLSS 5 NR file and put in same game folder as the .exe file
3 - Download his Optiscaler build here https://github.com/tig3rmast3r/OptiScaler_DLSSNR_VR/releases/tag/v0.1.1-dlssnr-vr2 3b - Unzip into game directory and install using the bat file as winmm.dll
4 - Download his OFXR-Bridge here https://github.com/tig3rmast3r/OFXR-Bridge/releases/tag/v0.1.0 4b - Unzip anywhere, launch it, arm it and select nvidia (medium) backend + 50% OFA size (To arm it, you need to double click on it in the taskbar overflow area, you know that little arrow on the taskbar 😉)
5 - Open the game, press INS and enable DLSS5. Tested only Ghost of Tsushima atm but at least OFXR works almost anywhere with Luke's games.
FPS before this guide = 89 FPS after this guide with dlss5 = 89

But honestly after spending the last couple days trying to get Cheeky to work more reliably with R.E.A.L., I feel like I have already fallen behind and there are probably new options out there. For instance, there may be an Optiscaler fork with more options at this point, and you can just use his OFXR bridge with that.

Welcome to the wild west of AI and computing!
Most importantly. If you happen to use DLSS5 NR while gaming in the buff, don't look down!

[Update 1]
The newest release of my cheeky fork now supports BG3! In the addon UI, you will need to use "DX12 Transport" instead of "DX11 Direct" in the "DX11 game processing path" dropdown for this game. It is also very important that you hit your fps cap always or you will have judder/reprojection when moving your head. If you can't hit 90, use 1/3 or use a lower refresh if your headset has it.

This release also implements a before-SR pass option for NR. It applies NR on the image before upscaling which saves performance based on how much you are upscaling. You will lose a large chunk of AO and some quality with this route. But if you really want to apply NR to the whole image and already use DLSS upscaling, it can work as a cheaper version of NR. I'll look at adding a second pass in the next version.

The crash while using Ray Reconstruction with Star Wars Outlaws is now fixed.

Link for my Cheeky fork.
Release Really Cheeky Foveated NR v1.0.1 · chronowake/ReallyCheekyFoveatedNR