Upscaling technologies like Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR have rapidly become almost essential for playing modern games at decent frame rates with the eye candy turned on. Problem is, support for the various upscalers varies from game to game. But now there’s a new tool that makes it easier than every to inject your upscaler of choice into your favourite game. AMD’s ML-infused FSR 4 upscaling in Cyberpunk? You betcha, though with caveats.
Give it up for OptiScaler, a new tool that allows you to swap in almost any upscaling technology. Its basic requirement is that the game in question already supports either DLSS 2 or higher, FSR 2 or higher or XeSS.
If support for any of those base upscaling technologies is present in a game, OptiScaler can inject your scaler of choice. That includes AMD’s new machine-learning optimised FSR 4. It’s claimed, for instance, that OptiScaler allows the new AMD RX 9070 XT to run Cyberpunk 2077 at 1440p with full path tracing enabled thanks to adding FSR 4 support.
It also supports various frame generation options, plus AMD’s Anti-Lag 2 tech. Well, that’s the theory. At present, 26 games are listed on the OptiScaler wiki and found to have at least some functionality with FSR 4, with a further 10 games listed with support for at least some swapping of one upscaler for another.
As we understand it, the very latest build of OptiScaler will automatically search for the relevant upscaling DLLs and swap in the replacements of your choice, though the wiki notes that if the process fails you may have to do it manually. You can access the OptiScaler GUI from within the game with a keyboard shortcut. It’s a pretty technical looking interface, but it’s still easier than doing all this manually with file swaps and command line inputs.
On paper, then, this is a really handy tool. For instance, AMD’s new FSR 4 ML-powered upscaler is a huge advance. But it’s not officially supported in very many games. Enabling it with OptiScaler significantly widens your options.
Of course, OptiScaler does nothing to change the fact that you still need an RDNA 4 AMD GPU for FSR 4, that means either an RX 9070 or RX 9070 XT, which only went on sale last week and are pretty much sold out right now.
Still, the basic notion of an easy-to-use tool that allows you to swap between the scaler of your choice, rather than some deal the developer has done with a GPU vendor, is very appealing.
It’s especially helpful for making AMD GPUs more appealing, given support for FSR and especially FSR 4 isn’t as widespread as that for Nvidia’s DLSS. Of course, it’s also good news for Nvidia GPU owners.
For those few titles that only have FSR support, they may now be able to swap in higher-quality DLSS upscaling. In short, everyone wins with a tool like this.
It could also come in handy for, well, handhelds with AMD APUs like the Asus ROG Ally X. For now, no AMD-based handheld gaming PC supports FSR 4. So, the ability to swap in, say, XeSS 1.3 could be very handy.
Anyway, being able to swap around between upscalers beyond those offered as standard by a given game and do it with relative ease is definitely a game changer. In the long run, you’d hope to be able to use the scaler of your choice from launch with any new game. But until that happens, tools like this will be invaluable.
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