HelixSR Mod 让 Steam Deck 与 AMD 掌机用上 DLSS 3.7，早期测试快于 FSR 4

A new mod is giving the Steam Deck and other AMD-powered handhelds something they were never supposed to have: NVIDIA's DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) upscaling.

HelixSR, released two days ago on GitHub by developer lonewolf0622, is a drop-in replacement for AMD's FSR 3.1 upscaler on Direct3D 12 that runs NVIDIA's DLSS neural network on AMD GPUs instead. Specifically, it uses Preset E (which the developer calls Model E), introduced with DLSS 3.7, the final iteration of DLSS's CNN-based model before NVIDIA switched to Transformer models with DLSS 4. That's actually a great fit for handhelds, since the CNN model is considerably lighter to run. Games still think they are talking to FSR 3.1, but what actually comes out is DLSS's reconstruction. The trick is that the network runs as plain DirectX 12 compute shaders, so it needs no NVIDIA driver, no CUDA, and no ROCm, and it even works on Linux through Proton and vkd3d-proton.

AMD's own machine learning upscaler, FSR 4, is officially limited to RDNA 4 GPUs, leaving the Steam Deck's RDNA 2 chip and even RDNA 3-based handhelds like the ROG Ally X stuck with the older, visibly inferior FSR 3, which still relies on temporal upscaling. Community workarounds can get FSR 4 running on those devices, but at a steep performance cost that the handheld machines simply cannot handle with taxing games.

That’s where HelixSR comes in. One ResetEra user measured roughly 3.5 ms per frame for HelixSR at 800p, versus 4.5 ms for FSR 4, and 7 ms versus 11 ms at 1080p, with the Steam Deck's GPU running at 1400 MHz. On the BC-250, the original poster saw an even starker difference when running IO Interactive's Hitman: World of Assassination at 4K, with 35 FPS using the DLSS Quality preset against 17 FPS with FSR 4.

Opinions on image quality vary a bit. The original poster found it not quite as good as FSR 4, but still much better than FSR 3. YouTuber BlackHeart909 was more enthusiastic, suggesting it might even look better than FSR 4 in some instances. In their testing, BlackHeart909 hit 34 to 40 FPS in Pragmata on the Steam Deck in Performance mode, and 35 to 40 FPS in CONTROL Resonant on the ROG Ally X at 1080p, a game that had previously suffered from heavy ghosting. Dropping the Ally X's output to 720p allowed a locked 60 FPS.

HelixSR is evolving very quickly. In the few days since its release, the developer has pushed out five updates, adding a single-file installer, a new Quality Super-Sampled Mode (QSSM) that renders above screen resolution for cleaner edges, and a fix for the blurry image reported on RDNA 3 GPUs under Windows, the same issue that affected BlackHeart909's ROG Ally X. It still has limits, though: it supports Direct3D 12 games only, with no Vulkan support, and games that don't use FSR 3.1 require OptiScaler.

For Steam Deck owners who have watched the upscaling gap widen over the past couple of years, though, it is a very intriguing development that might well prolong the device's longevity while Valve waits for the perfect time to introduce a Steam Deck 2 device. Last we heard from AMD leaker Kepler_L2, Valve is targeting 2028, although the ongoing component crisis could delay its release.

About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.

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