Tools
Software I built while taking games apart.
Free, open source, and written because a game would not do the thing it should have been able to do. Everything here is downloadable from this site and its source is public.
Returnal Multi-Frame Generation
3X, 4X, 5X and 6X frame generation in a game that ships 2X as its hard ceiling.
Returnal was built against NVIDIA Streamline 1.3.3. Multi-frame generation needs 2.11 or newer, and the game hardcodes a request for exactly one generated frame. This is a small proxy that sits beside the game and translates the old SDK calls into the new ones while it runs, so the ceiling goes away.
It is pure NVIDIA: DLSS Frame Generation, Reflex and PCL through Streamline. There is no FSR, no XeSS and no AMD code anywhere in it. Nothing on disk is patched, so deleting two files undoes all of it.
- Needs
- An NVIDIA GPU whose driver supports DLSS Multi-Frame Generation, and NVIDIA Streamline 2.13, which you download yourself from NVIDIA. The game verifies the signature on those files, so only NVIDIA's own signed build works.
- Multiplier
- One line in
SamiMirash_Returnal_MFG.ini:InterpolationCount, where 1 is 2X and 5 is 6X. - Scope
- Returnal only, deliberately. It hardcodes byte offsets into that game's own binaries.
- Checksum
b26d5dc2d04b3098224d8875c6d730755709ec93a15a6ccb31aabc109bd26d68
Measured here, on one machine, in one scene:
| Setting | Frames presented | On screen | 1% low |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2X | 2 | 130 | 111 |
| 3X | 3 | 187 | 109 |
| 4X | 4 | 225 | 189 |
| 5X | 5 | 225 | 148 |
| 6X | 6 | 225 | 170 |
Above 4X buys nothing on this setup, because the display ceiling is already saturated at 225, and it costs smoothness. 4X has the best frame consistency of the five. Your numbers will differ.
What is in the download, and what is not. The only binary in the zip is
winmm.dll, which is our own compiled code, released under the MIT licence.
MinHook is compiled into it under the
BSD-2-Clause licence and its notice travels with it.
Nothing else in the package belongs to anyone else. NVIDIA Streamline is
not included: you download it from
NVIDIA's own releases, which
is also the only way it works, because Returnal verifies the signature on those files and
refuses anything that is not NVIDIA's signed build. Windows' own winmm.dll is
not included either. setup.cmd makes that copy from your own machine. No
Returnal code or assets are included or redistributed.
Unofficial and unaffiliated with NVIDIA, Housemarque or Sony. Use at your own risk.
At 4X the engine renders 56 real frames to fill the same display that 2X needs 112 for, and the GPU time that frees is what pays for neural rendering. The full account, including three bugs that each looked like something else, is in the article.
More to come. Everything I build ends up here and on GitHub.