NVIDIA DLSS

NVIDIA DLSS renders your Unreal app at a lower resolution and upscales it with NVIDIA's model. You get frame rate back on a GPU you cannot make faster.

Why it matters more here than on a desktop

On a streamed app the GPU is fixed — it is the machine allocated to your app, not one the viewer can upgrade. If your project is short of frame rate, you cannot ask for better hardware; you have to render more cheaply. DLSS does exactly that: fewer pixels rendered, the missing ones reconstructed.

And frame rate is what the viewer sees

Every frame your app fails to produce is a frame the encoder cannot send. Rendering headroom shows up directly as smoothness in the stream, which is not true of a desktop build where the display is local.

Running demo.

Adding it to your project

  1. Download the DLSS plugin from NVIDIA, matching your Unreal version.

    Downloading the DLSS plugin for a specific Unreal version

  2. Copy all the plugin folders from the package's Plugins folder — DLSS, DLSSMoviePipelineSupport, NIS and the Streamline folders — into your project's Plugins directory.

    The eight DLSS package plugin folders
    The eight folders to copy. This screenshot shows them in the engine's own plugin folder; the project's Plugins directory holds the same set.

  3. Copy the widget plugin too, from plugin → samples → Plugins. This is the on-screen overlay that lets you see and change DLSS settings while running.

    Copying the DLSS widget plugin

  4. Clone the Blueprint folder from the sample content into your project.

    Cloning the sample Blueprint folder

  5. Enable Pixel Streaming, DLSS (NVIDIA) and NVIDIA UI Widgets Lib under Edit → Plugins, then restart the editor. UI Widgets Lib is what the widget from step 3 is built on.

    Enabling the NVIDIA UI Widgets Lib plugin

  6. Show the widget from your Level Blueprint, so you can toggle DLSS modes at runtime.

    Level Blueprint logic to display the DLSS widget
    The Show Mouse Cursor node here is for testing in the editor only. In a streamed build it gives the slow, Unreal-drawn cursor — see mouse and fullscreen.

Testing it

Launch in Standalone Game mode and confirm the widget appears and responds. Press H to hide the overlay once you have what you need.

The DLSS widget running in standalone game mode

Before packaging

  1. Set the mode you chose at Event BeginPlay in the Level Blueprint, with the DLSS Blueprint library's Set DLSS-SR Mode node (Set DLSS Mode in older plugin versions).

  2. Delete the widget nodes from step 6, including Show Mouse Cursor, so the overlay never reaches a viewer.

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