The older NVIDIA graphics card owners can now enjoy the latest upscaling features which were previously limited to newer cards. Unofficial DLSS 3.7 is now available for GTX 10 series (Pascal microarchitecture, released in 2016) with HelixSR update 1.9. This means the legacy GPU users can play intense titles at higher frame rates without upgrading to newer components.
HelixSR 1.9 mod enables modern upscaling on legacy Pascal GPUs
The HelixSR basically acts as a life-extension tool for your older graphics card. It's like the gap between Pascal and the modern rendering has narrowed a little.
HelixSR is a modification tool that works by intercepting the game rendering calls and then translates it for the older card. It makes use of open-source component named 'OptiScaler' to translate the instructions for the modern tensor cores. This 'translator' layer enables the GPU to perform deep learning super sampling routines even if it doesn't have any dedicated AI hardware. It's all emulated in software and not native hardware support that's why we have some inconsistency in performance in various titles.
We've tested this on our system with NVIDIA Titan X Pascal GPU and AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU. Our system has 32GB DDR4 3200MHz RAM so there's no chance of any CPU bottlenecking. We're running Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p – High settings.
The DLSS 3.7 is giving frame rates ranging from 85 to 99 FPS. We've had instances of 119 FPS while running the game in open roads. It results in a smoother experience rather than rendering native.
On top of that, we've noticed the visual stability which is usually a problem with the older upscaling solutions. The tests indicate the DLSS 3.7 is able to completely remove flickering of small objects and road geometry, which was the case with the previous iterations. We also checked it with AMD FSR 3.1.5, where we're only getting 55 to 65 FPS in the same situation. Also, titles like 'The Outer Worlds' and 'The Witcher 3 Remastered' have shown an absolute 10 to 20+ FPS increase with the latest update.
This is a community modification. There's no official NVIDIA driver update. This mod is heavily dependent on which game engine you're using.
It's also dependent on which version of the driver you're using on your system. Keep in mind that, since the tool is translating complex instructions to a hardware that doesn't physically have tensor cores, you're gonna experience some variation. This update finally makes it feasible for the GTX 10 series users to have some modern graphic features on their legacy hardware.
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