A few hours ago, modder PureDark shared a brief DLSS 3 mod The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim video showcase on YouTube, demonstrating the work-in-progress of his DLSS Frame Generation implementation into The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
As covered in our previous report, PureDark was initially testing a DLSS 3 mod in Elden Ring, but there were several issues with that implementation. To get a better understanding of what was going wrong with it, the modder decided to implement DLSS Frame Generation in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim since he has a lot of experience with the Creation Engine, having previously released DLSS 2 (Super Resolution) mods for both Skyrim and Fallout 4.
In the test video, the DLSS 3 mod doubles the frame rate of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim compared to using only DLSS Super Resolution. The modder also showed a built-in tool to simulate additional CPU load as a test for those configurations that might be bottlenecked by the CPU. Those are the cases that DLSS Frame Generation was designed to overcome since it creates entirely new frames without even passing from the CPU. The chief example was Microsoft Flight Simulator, which didn’t get any meaningful improvement with DLSS Super Resolution but has its frame rate doubled when using DLSS Frame Generation.
The issue with Reflex remains, though, so the latency isn’t properly lowered at this time. PureDark signaled the problem on NVIDIA’s Streamline GitHub; we’ve also forwarded it to NVIDIA PR, so hopefully, it’ll get escalated and resolved sooner than later.
This first DLSS 3 mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim could open the way to many more, starting with the Elden Ring one. All of this modding work is possible thanks to NVIDIA’s decision to publically share the plugin as part of the Streamline SDK update that became available at the recent Game Developers Conference 2023.
DLSS 3 is already receiving an extremely fast adoption rate compared to other upscaling technologies (including its sibling DLSS 2), but it is unlikely it will ever be added to an already-released game. That’s why DLSS 3 mods can greatly increase the mileage that GeForce RTX 40 Series owners get out of their graphics cards, the only ones to support Frame Generation at this time. The technology is based on the Optical Flow Accelerators, which are also available in previous RTX generations. Still, NVIDIA said the ones included in Ada Lovelace’s new architecture are much faster and more accurate, making them capable of generating the frame in a timely and appropriate fashion.
