Steam Deck can now run Nvidia DLSS 3.7 upscaling, thanks to this mod

What happened

Steam Deck can now run Nvidia DLSS 3.7 upscaling, thanks to this mod, according to Club386. The Steam Deck and other AMD-based handhelds can now reap the benefits of Nvidia DLSS 3.7 for better upscaled image quality relative to AMD FSR 3.1. It’s now possible to run Nvidia DLSS 3.7 on your Steam Deck, albeit unofficially, thanks to a new mod dubbed Helix Super Resolution (HelixSR). NVIDIA is a semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, and its products and services include graphics processing units. Valve is a video game company based in Bellevue.

The mod not only opens the door to significantly better upscaled image quality on Valve’s handhelds, but also across other AMD-based handhelds, if they’re using RDNA 3 or RDNA 2 GPUs (a chip built for many calculations at once, used for graphics and AI). Sole developer lonewolf0622 describes HelixSR as an “FSR/DLSS hybrid upscaler,” as it combines Nvidia’s neural reconstruction with AMD’s interface and input handling.

In a nutshell, games communicate with the mod via FSR 3.1, but the upscaling step in the rendering pipeline operates with DLSS 3.7 instead. HelixSR sidesteps the need for Tensor cores, or any form of hardware AI acceleration, which is altogether absent on the Steam Deck’s custom AMD APU.