Elden Ring DLSS Mod Gives a Sizable Average FPS Boost, Though You Need a Sharpening Filter with It

The Elden Ring DLSS mod is finally available through PureDark's Patreon. As the upscaler mod is still in beta, you'll need to subscribe as a Supporter (the lowest tier available, priced at €5.99 plus VAT) to receive access to it. The mod will likely be available for free when it comes out of beta, as was the case with previous PureDark mods for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Fallout 4, Resident Evil Village, and other RE Engine games (Resident Evil 4 Remake included).

I've tested the Elden Ring DLSS mod and can happily report a sizable boost in average frame rates with the Quality preset (you can also select Native, which is effectively DLAA). In the starting area of FromSoftware's open world action RPG masterpiece, the game ran around 18 frames faster on average on my PC (Intel i7 12700KF, GeForce RTX 4090, 16GB DDR4). The gains on the 1% FPS and the 0.2% FPS were less meaningful, only yielding around 5 and 4 additional frames per second compared to the native version. Still, it's undoubtedly a welcome improvement for anyone interested in enabling the nice but costly ray traced effects added with the game's most recent patch (version 1.09).

There is a caveat, though. The Elden Ring DLSS mod does not have any built-in sharpener when you select the DLSS option, which means by default the game will look much softer than it does in native rendering, hiding some of the finer details. With official DLSS implementations, this is usually offset by a built-in sharpening that many games nowadays expose with a slider (so users can tweak the amount of sharpness to their preference).

However, PureDark did not add any sharpening to his Elden Ring DLSS mod, which means you'll have to add the sharpening yourself. Since the mod uses ReShade anyway, this is a fairly straightforward endeavor.

As a reminder, PureDark's mod also supports Intel XeSS and AMD FSR 2 options, with the latter already equipped with the built-in FidelityFX CAS (Contrast Adaptive Sharpening) feature. However, GeForce RTX users will still want to select DLSS as the upscaling option and then just add a sharpening shader separately. One option is FidelityFX CAS, which was ported to ReShade shortly after AMD made it available on their GPUOpen website. However, there are others, such as Luma Sharpen, qUINT Sharpen, and more.

I've checked out both FidelityFX CAS and Luma Sharpen. They provide similar results, though you'll have to bump them relatively high to counter the softening. In the screenshots below, I've maxed out the slider for both of them at 3.0, and the sharpness was similar to the native one. If you feel like that's too much or if you encounter any visual artifacts from the sharpener, dial that back a bit to 2.5.

Once the soft image issue is resolved, the Elden Ring DLSS mod is an excellent way to gain extra frames per second, whether your PC struggled before or you simply want to turn on that shiny new ray tracing setting. To clarify, this is the Super Resolution version of DLSS; as mentioned two days ago, PureDark is also working on adding Frame Generation to Elden Ring, though he's now trying to do it in Skyrim first after hitting a snag on FromSoftware's game.

The modder is working on enabling DLSS 3 in Skyrim, nearly doubling the frame rate in the process. However, there's still work to be done in several areas (excluding the UI from the generated frames, for example), and Reflex doesn't seem to be working. That said, it's progress towards DLSS 3 implementation in these games and potentially others, too.

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