NVIDIA's DLSS 5 neural renderer, applied to your whole Windows desktop in real time. Everything on screen — games, video, photos — goes through the same neural network that DLSS 5 games use, and comes back sharper.
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Everything lives in one menu inside the overlay. The Before / after wipe slider splits the screen down the middle so you can see what the effect is actually doing.
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Windows 11
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An NVIDIA RTX card. What works, honestly:
Cards Status RTX 50 (Blackwell) ✅ works - the officially supported generation RTX 40 (Ada) ✅ works - through the built-in architecture hook RTX 30 (Ampere) ✅ works - restored in v1.5.1 (the universal runtime + spoof 0x1B0, same stack as v1.3.0) RTX 20 (Turing) ❌ cannot run the neural pass at all - below the minimum architecture (DLSS5-Feeder issue #73). See Trying RTX 20 below. Laptops with hybrid graphics (Optimus) ⚠️ works only when the display is driven by the NVIDIA GPU - force the dGPU (MUX switch, or an external monitor on the dGPU port). On the iGPU it fails on the first frame -
Nothing installed. The release archive brings its own Python.
Turing is below the minimum architecture - no runtime build makes the neural pass run on it (0xBAD00001, FeatureNotSupported). The program will start and the menu works; the picture is not processed. No workaround exists.
- Download the archive from Releases
and unpack it anywhere. Everything is inside — including NVIDIA's
nvngx_dlssnr.dll(165 MB, too big for GitHub to keep in the repository, so it ships in the archive instead). - Run
NeuralScreen.exe.
Windows will probably warn you about an unknown publisher the first time — the
program is not signed with a paid certificate. Click More info → Run
anyway. If you would rather not, NeuralScreen.vbs next to it does the same
thing.
There is no installer and nothing is written outside the folder. To remove it, delete the folder.
Do not use it in competitive online games. A process named
nvngx.dllplus a fullscreen overlay is exactly what anti-cheat systems look for.
The program sits in the tray (with a taskbar button) and draws over your desktop. Press Num2 for the menu. The hotkeys live on the numpad, so Num Lock has to be on - with it off those keys send Insert/End/arrows instead and nothing happens.
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| Num2 | open / close the menu |
| Num1 | neural rendering on / off |
| Num3 | screenshot |
| Num0 | start / stop recording, with sound |
| Num4 / Num6 | processing resolution down / up |
| Num5 | process one window instead of the whole screen |
| Ctrl+Alt+Q | quit |
Every key can be reassigned in the menu, under the sliders icon.
While the menu is open it takes the mouse and keyboard, so it works on top of a game. Closed, clicks go straight through it as if it were not there.
Startup and mode switches do not flash: the overlay appears with the first real frame, a brief blur-with-spinner covers the pipeline rebuild.
NeuralScreen renders the whole screen by default. To process one window instead (a game, a browser): point at it, press Num5 or pick Select window... in the menu. The overlay follows the window. Back to the whole screen: Num5 again or Fullscreen in the menu. Minimising the window pauses processing.
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The dot next to your graphics card is green when neural rendering is actually running on it, red when it is not.
The settings worth touching:
- Profile — how strong the effect is, from Faithful to Extreme. Start at Strong / Cinematic and go from there. The four sliders underneath are the same thing in detail.
- Before / after wipe — leaves the left part of the screen untouched so you can see what the effect is doing. Set it back to 0 when done.
- Resolution the network runs at — one slider. At the top it is your whole screen, which is the default and the best picture. Every step down hands the network a smaller frame: with the slider off the default (full screen) the network is already at its best, and every step down means roughly 50% more frames at 2560×1440 on a 4K screen. The picture stays sharp: the network's result is composed onto the pristine 1:1 native frame (a matched residual composite), so text, edges and UI keep full resolution while the cheap low-res network does the relighting. Look at your own screen and pick a step.
Everything else — which monitor, whether the menu opens on launch, starting with Windows, key assignments — is behind the sliders icon.
Num0 records what you see, with system sound, into an MP4 in
recordings. Num3 saves a screenshot. The menu shows up in both if
open - on purpose.
Record the processed picture externally:
- OBS (recommended): launch with
NS_SPOUT=1(environment variable, e.g.set NS_SPOUT=1thenNeuralScreen.exe). The worker publishes the output as a Spout2 shared texture - add a Spout2 Capture source in OBS (free plugin) and record. Works in full-screen mode too. Off by default. - NVIDIA App / OBS display capture: use one-window mode - point at the window, Num5, record, Num5 when done. In this mode the overlay is visible to screen capture; in full-screen mode it hides (the program captures the screen itself, and a visible overlay would feed on itself).
Nothing appears after launch. Check NeuralScreen.log next to the
program; the most common cause is a missing native\nvngx_dlssnr.dll.
The overlay is invisible in a game. True fullscreen cannot have anything drawn over it — a Windows rule. Switch the game to borderless or windowed fullscreen.
The menu pointer is missing or frozen. A fullscreen game hides the system cursor; the overlay only shows the system cursor. Borderless fixes it.
The numpad hotkeys do nothing. They need Num Lock to be on. With Num Lock off the numpad sends Insert/End/arrows and the keys simply do not exist.
The picture is soft. Put Resolution the network runs at back to the top of its slider.
A key does nothing. Something else claimed it; reassign it in the menu under the sliders icon.
The menu is slow in a heavy game. At 4K the pipeline can take up to a second per frame; a press may feel lost. The picture is the priority.
- True fullscreen games cannot have the overlay drawn over them — a Windows rule. Borderless or windowed only.
- A second instance is not guarded — close the first one first.
- The window list shows every visible window; Num5 takes the one under the cursor. A second monitor works but was not tested with a window between them; the menu position in window mode starts bottom-right.
- HDR displays are not supported: switch to SDR (Win+Alt+B).
- Pipeline latency is 40–60 ms — fine interactively, not competitively; processing resolution is capped at 2560×1440 (the network refuses 4K), output is always your full native resolution.
- The bundled
nvngx_dlssnr.dllis the leaked 310.8.0 runtime carrying sm_75/86/89/120 kernels (RTX 20-50) — see License below.
Under the hood — how it works, what was measured and why: docs/TECHNICAL.md. Русская версия: README.ru.md.
The code here is MIT. NVIDIA's nvngx_dlssnr.dll is the leaked 310.8.0
runtime (sm_75/86/89/120 kernels, RTX 20-50). Included as-is, no
guarantees; research-only.