With the introduction of FSR4 alongside the 9070 XT back in May, AMD finally levelled the playing field in the discrete GPU market, addressing a feature disparity compared to its rival Nvidia that had lasted nearly 7 years. However, although FSR4 closed the quality gap to Nvidia's DLSS Transformer model, it still lags in one critical department: game support.
Current state of game support - How AMD FSR4 Stacks Against NVIDIA DLSS4
AMD advertised 30+ games with FSR4 support at launch, and promised to deliver 75+ throughout 2025. They successfully hit this milestone back in September, when they crossed 85+ supported games. Although such rapid proliferation of support for FSR4 is truly impressive, it still pales next to the number of games with native DLSS4 integration - more than 175 as of the end of August.
This situation becomes even more dire when you take into account upscaler upgrade options for both solutions: on the Nvidia side, you can use the Nvidia app to override DLSS Transformer support into almost any DLSS game. However, FSR4 can only be applied as an upgrade to games with support for FSR3.1 and above, putting it at a severe disadvantage to Nvidia.
This would be a dire state of affairs for AMD, but in typical fashion, the community has come to the rescue. Enter Optiscaler, an all-purpose mod that, similar to the all-purpose spray WD-40, lubricates the hodge-podge upscaling ecosystems of all the hardware vendors. With Optiscaler enabled, you can use the game’s built-in FSR or DLSS inputs from version 2.x on, and enjoy a crisp FSR4 upscaled output.
Obviously, this isn’t as seamless an experience as one might hope for, but I’ve been using Optiscaler to enjoy FSR4 in titles like Clair Obscur, A Plague Tale: Requiem, and Black Myth: Wukong, and I’ve been mightily impressed with what the community has managed to pull off here. So, without further ado, let’s get into the installation process for this wonderful little mod.
How to install Optiscaler
The mod can be downloaded from the following link: https://github.com/optiscaler/OptiScaler. Navigate to Releases from the right-hand side and grab the latest version. Make sure not to download the source code but the actual Optiscaler.7z package itself.
Once you’ve done that, extract the downloaded Optiscaler zip package. You should see the contents of the package once completed:
Now we've got all the files to be injected into our game folder. The next step is to actually locate the game's directory. This changes depending on your game platform.
For Game Pass titles, the folder will be located in C:\XboxGames.
For Steam games, you can find the folder at the following address: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common. Alternatively, you can also right-click the game's icon in your Steam Library and select Manage > Browse Local Files.
After locating your game's installation directory, navigate through the subfolders until you find the actual executable for the game. This executable can be named differently depending on the game and the launcher.
For example, on Gamepass, Clair Obscur's executable is buried within several subfolders (Clair Obscur - Expedition 33 > Content > Sandfall > Binaries > WinGDK), and it's called "Sandfall-WinGDK-Shipping.exe". Whereas A Plague Tale: Requiem has only one subfolder, Content, and the executable’s name is “APT2_WinStore.x64.Submission.exe”. Other games will have the executable simply named after the title of the game itself: for example, “RDR2.exe”. Typically, Steam games have the executable in the main folder of the game, not within layers of subfolders.
Regardless of the location of the executable, the next step is to drag and drop the contents of the extracted Optiscaler folder into the folder containing your game executable. If prompted, select "Replace All Files". Then, run setup_windows.bat, and input the following numbers:
- Enter
1For the default filename (dxgi.dll), except for Red Dead Redemption 2, for which you should enter 2 to set the filename as winmm.dll. - Enter 1 for AMD GPU.
- Enter 1 to include DLSS inputs (optional) or input 2 to only use FSR/XeSS inputs. Note that DLSS inputs may result in a better output quality, but can be less stable.
Note that if you choose to include DLSS inputs, you'll need to extract fakenvapi to the same folder as the Optiscaler install. You can download fakenvapi here.
At this point, the installation is almost complete. The only thing left to do is grab a specific file from C:\Windows\System32. You can access that folder directly by pressing Win + R, pasting the path, and pressing Enter. Once in the System32 folder, search for a file called "amdxcffx64.dll". Copy and paste it into the Optiscaler install folder.
Now the installation is complete! The only thing left to do is configure Optiscaler from within the game. Launch your game and navigate to the graphics menu. Enable the upscaling method you want to take inputs from - typically, DLSS results in the best output, but may be susceptible to artifacts and performance issues. Select your desired upscaling quality here, too.
Exit the graphics menu and get into the game. Once in, press Insert to bring up the in-game Optiscaler menu. Change the upscaler from the default setting (typically XeSS) to FSR3.X/4.
Now, change the model number according to the base resolution you’ve selected. Note that this doesn’t affect the upscaling method, but rather adjusts parameters such as sharpness in order to achieve the best image quality. The numbers correspond to the following base resolutions:
- Model 0: FSR4 AA (full resolution/ultra quality)
- Model 1: Quality
- Model 2: Balanced
- Model 3: Performance
- Model 5: Ultra Performance
(Yes, we skipped over Model 4; perhaps the Optiscaler devs will fix this in a later patch.)
And you're done! Enjoy your sharp FSR4 upscaled image. Some quality of life tips: You can change the keybind to bring up the Optiscaler menu in-game by going to Optiscaler.ini within the game folder, and changing the value of the variable ShortcutKey. Note that the accepted values are key codes, and alphanumeric values won’t be accepted; to find the corresponding key code for any button on your keyboard, check this link: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/inputdev/virtual-key-codes.
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