Developer maximedgoulet created the open-source mod FoveatedDLSS5, bringing the foveated rendering concept commonly used in VR headsets to standard monitors. In an 8K ultra-wide test of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt running on an RTX 4090, the game's frame rate increased from around 49 FPS to over 80 FPS, a boost of approximately 63%.
VR headsets typically use eye tracking to allocate more rendering resources to the area the player is looking at, while reducing detail in peripheral vision. FoveatedDLSS5 does not track gaze by default; instead, it maintains full quality in the center of the screen and gradually reduces processing resolution toward the edges, making it primarily suited for ultra-wide monitor setups.
This mod is an extension of RenoDX DLSS 5 for ReShade and does not alter the output resolution selected by the game. It compresses the computational grid before the image is sent to the neural network and restores it to the monitor's native resolution after processing, allowing DLSS 5 to cover the entire screen while reducing the number of pixels that need to be processed. Users can separately adjust the central high-quality area, the transition band width, and the edge resolution.
At a resolution of 7680×2160 with default settings, the processing grid is reduced to 5540×2132, resulting in approximately 71% of the original pixel count. The aforementioned tests utilized DLSS 5 Neural Rendering with double processing, and developers state that the drop in edge quality is hardly noticeable during gameplay.