NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Super Sampling “DLSS 3.0” introduced Frame Generation to the PC gaming industry. This has been an unprecedented development, boosting performance by up to 3x and allowing the use of advanced path-tracing technologies. Unfortunately, DLSS 3 and Frame Generation are Iimited to the RTX 40 series GPUs, requiring the upgraded Optical Flow processor of the Ada Lovelace architecture. Luckily, modders have emulated frame generation for the older RTX cards using the AMD FSR 3 source code.
Digital Foundry tested one of these mods on the RTX 20 and RTX 30 series GPUs and found that it improves in-game performance by up to 75%. That’s a generational upgrade right there. The downside of this mod is that it’s only supported in titles with native DLSS 3 support. It uses the same implementation path as DLSS 3 to patch in FSR 3, a free and open-source frame-generation technology. We tested FSR 3 at launch and found it to be on par or better than DLSS 3.
The DLSS 3 mod leverages two .dll files to inject the FSR 3 “Frame Gen” code into the game. A registry tweak allows RTX 20/RTX 30 users to run the frame generation algorithm on their hardware. You’re enabling FSR 3 using the DLSS 3 path by bypassing a Windows check for RTX 40 series GPUs.
Games like Cyberpunk 2077, which require frame generation for path tracing, are up to 80% faster on RTX 3080 series GPUs with this mod. Similar gains can be observed in the Witcher 3 with all ray tracing options enabled. More recently launched DLSS 3 titles like Modern Warfare 3 and Alan Wake 2 should also run considerably smoother at the path tracing preset.
Unfortunately, like all temporally injected mods, it suffers from glitches and visual artifacts affecting the in-game HUD, shadows, and other baked-in effects. For the most part, though, the gameplay was very playable.
