They Ran DLSS 5 on an Intel Graphics Card: How’s the Performance?
Mod developers continue to bring technologies exclusive to NVIDIA hardware to different platforms. Most recently, it was announced that DLSS 5 Neural Rendering technology was successfully run on the Intel Arc 140V graphics unit. This development is seen as a module of hardware enthusiasts’ efforts to use advanced image processing techniques on hardware other than […]
Mod developers continue to bring technologies exclusive to NVIDIA hardware to different platforms. Most recently, it was announced that DLSS 5 Neural Rendering technology was successfully run on the Intel Arc 140V graphics unit.
This development is seen as a module of hardware enthusiasts’ efforts to use advanced image processing techniques on hardware other than NVIDIA. The project, named “dlss-nr-on-intel” and developed by Reddit user u/UzbekUnknown, targets the Intel Arc 140V iGPU unit found in Lunar Lake processors.
How does the technology work?
This work yields results on a graphics unit based on the Intel Xe2 architecture without requiring NVIDIA’s proprietary CUDA or NGX libraries. The project leverages Intel’s XMX matrix engines by running the neural process boundary through a Vulkan layer.
The application reconstructs the 71-block U-Net structure used by DLSS Neural Rendering. The process is implemented using FP16 and FP32 accumulations with the “VK_KHR_cooperative_matrix” Vulkan extension.
The pipeline can be integrated into frame-serving applications via Vulkan thanks to the “vkQueuePresentKHR” hook. This allows for an image processing experiment beyond classical formulas.
Performance results and limitations
The developer tested this system in games such as Dead or Alive 5 Last Round, Tekken 7, and Mortal Kombat 1. However, due to the heavy load imposed by DLSS 5 NR technology, performance costs remain quite low.
In tests conducted on the Intel Arc 140V, frame rates of only 3 to 5 FPS were obtained at 720p resolution. At lower resolutions such as 640x360p, Tekken 7 can run at approximately 10.5 FPS.
Processing a frame at 1920×1080 resolution can take hundreds of milliseconds. This significantly reduces the gaming experience to playable levels.
In addition, approximately 2.3 GB of memory space needs to be allocated for device buffers at 720p resolution. Since the Arc 140V uses shared system RAM, this memory consumption also affects the overall performance of the system.
This application is entirely an unofficial study. Users need to provide their own compatible DLSDS documentation to extract the necessary model payloads.
Do you think these kinds of modifications could lay the groundwork for smoothing future gaming performance of integrated graphics units?
