NVIDIA disabled native sharpening in DLSS 2.5.1 and recommends developers to use NIS Sharpening in the future

NVIDIA DLSS version 2.5.1 debuted in the latest Portal RTX patch released last week. After the festivities, it turned out that this latest version of the software no longer has a built-in sharpening filter. Experienced users have used alternative methods (like hex editing or DLSS SDK .dll, which however added a watermark) to fix sharpness issues in some games like Red Dead Redemption 2 or God of War. The problems were most noticeable while driving.

The news was confirmed by NVIDIA RTX Unreal Engine evangelist Richard Cowgill (fatheadlifter on Reddit) with the following posts. NVIDIA seems to recommend that game developers use NVIDIA Image Scaling sharpening in the future.

Yes, DLSS sharpening is now deprecated in NVIDIA DLSS 2.5.1. Instead, we recommend that developers use NIS (Nvidia image scaler) sharpening. NIS has an excellent sharpening technique and can also provide cross-platform hardware fallback without RTX for scaling. The latest version of DLSS simply no longer uses the old DLSS sharpening method. We recommend that developers use NIS sharpening when implementing DLSS. This should result in better image quality.

NVIDIA Image Scaling (NIS) was released in November 2021 as an update to previous image scaling technology. The new algorithm uses a 6-tap filter, 4-way scaling and adaptive sharpening filters. Resizing and sharpening are also done in one step, improving performance.

NVIDIA Image Scaling works with GPUs from all manufacturers (including AMD and Intel) and is open source. Game developers interested in adding NIS to their games can download the latest SDK from Git Hub.

If you want to check the scaling results available with NVIDIA DLSS 2.5.1, you will need to download the latest .dll from TechPowerUp and manually embed the file into the game of your choice, or use Australian programmer Brad Moore’s handy DLSS Swapper tool.