DLSS 5 Neural Rendering in Warhammer Online — with the UI left untouched (community beta)
TL;DR: WAR now runs through a modified DXVK that gives NVIDIA's DLSS 5 real motion vectors and depth straight from the game's camera, and puts the neural-rendered frame back under the UI. Chat, hotbars and nameplates stay razor sharp. One zip, one install.bat, launcher as usual. RTX 50xx card required.
What this is
NVIDIA released DLSS 5 "neural rendering" on 3 September — a neural pass that re-lights and re-shades a finished frame on top of DLAA anti-aliasing. It was never meant for a 2008 Direct3D 9 game. This project makes it work in Return of Reckoning anyway, and does it properly:
- The interface is not touched. The neural pass runs on the 3D scene only; the UI is drawn on top afterwards, exactly as the game draws it. No blurry chat, no smeared tooltips — the usual downside of "run everything through ReShade".
- Real motion vectors, not guessed ones. The wrapper reads the camera matrix from the game's own shaders every frame and computes per-pixel motion from depth and camera reprojection. DLSS gets what a native integration would give it, so turning the camera does not smear the world.
- Sub-pixel jitter, depth, colour — the full set of inputs DLSS expects — are produced inside the D3D9 wrapper and shared with a 64-bit helper through Vulkan.
- Nothing is injected into the game beyond a replacement d3d9.dll (the same mechanism DXVK users already rely on). No memory hooks, no ReShade inside WAR.exe.
How it works (the short version)
- A fork of DXVK translates the game's Direct3D 9 to Vulkan. It recognises WAR's shaders (a census of the game's shader set), injects Halton jitter into the projection, captures the camera and runs a compute pass that turns depth + camera reprojection into motion vectors.
- A 64-bit helper (war_sidecar.exe) imports those images and drives the open-source DLSS5-Feeder host, which runs DLAA and the RenoDX DLSS 5 neural pass on the GPU.
- The result comes back through shared memory and is presented before the UI is drawn. Round trip: about 10 ms per frame on an RTX 5080 at 3440x1440.
Requirements
- Windows 10/11 64-bit, NVIDIA RTX GPU, driver 616.64 or newer. Verified on RTX 50; the DLSS5-Feeder project reports RTX 20/40 cards working, but I could not test that — reports welcome.
- Three files you must fetch yourself (they cannot be redistributed): renodx-dlss5.addon64 and nvngx_dlssnr.dll from the RenoDX Discord (#DLSS5 channel), and a nvngx_dlss.dll (DLSS Swapper or any DLSS game). The README has the links.
- Not compatible with dgVoodoo2 or ReShade installed in the game folder — the installer moves them aside and the uninstaller puts them back.
- Download WAR-NR-0.1.1-beta.zip and extract it anywhere.
- Put the three files above next to install.bat.
- Run install.bat (game and launcher closed). It finds the game folder, backs up your d3d9.dll and dxvk.conf, copies everything and prints an [ OK ] / [WARN] / [FAIL] report with a fix for every failure.
- Start the game normally, enter the world. After 2–4 seconds the picture switches over.
Tuning
- war_sidecar.cfg in the game folder is re-read while you play. The nr_* keys write the same settings into the helper's ini and restart it automatically (2–3 s without DLSS, the game keeps running). Documented in docs\nr-settings.md.
- Characters and other moving objects currently get the camera's motion vector, not their own, so a running player can show a faint ghost trail. A proper velocity pass for skinned geometry is the next big item.
- Bright, white-armoured characters can get a halo from the neural pass. Lowering "Structure Intensity" / "Local Tone" in the panel (or nr_local_structure = 1 in the cfg) reduces it. I am still looking for the best default.
- The frame waits for DLSS, so the round trip is added to every frame (~10 ms). A pipelined mode (one frame of latency instead) is planned.
- The neural look itself is a matter of taste. Toggle it with F6 and decide for yourself.
This is a rendering wrapper in the DXVK family: it replaces d3d9.dll, reads nothing from the game's memory and sends nothing to the server. Still, it is third-party software — if the RoR team has any objection or wants to look at the sources, I am happy to oblige. Use at your own risk until then.
Credits
- DLSS5-Feeder by Jean-Laurent Rouzies — the 64-bit host and the protocol this project speaks (MIT).
- The RenoDX DLSS 5 add-on by Krish and the RenoDX community — the neural pass.
- DXVK by Philip Rebohle and contributors — the D3D9-to-Vulkan layer this fork is built on (zlib).
- ReShade by Patrick Mours — used only inside the helper as the add-on loader (BSD).
- NVIDIA for DLSS 5.
If you try it, please post: your GPU and driver, resolution, whether the picture switched over, and — if something went wrong — the war_sidecar.log and WAR_d3d9.log from the game folder. Screenshots very welcome, especially before/after pairs and different zones.
Enjoy!
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After side conf:
