In context: Respawn Entertainment's Jedi-themed action sequel has taken the cake in what has so far been a particularly bad year for AAA PC game launches. The studio is already releasing patches to fix performance, but a modder is taking matters into his own hands by hacking Nvidia's DLSS 3 frame generation into the title. Elden Ring and Skyrim are also receiving similar mods.

An in-development mod is bringing DLSS 3 frame generation to Star Wars Jedi: Survivor – one of the games currently most in need of it. EA is also releasing official patches to improve the game's harshly criticized PC performance.

The Jedi action game experienced one of the worst PC launches of 2023 (so far) last week. Press and players hammered the title for its adverse CPU and VRAM performance. Reports claim it can allocate over 18GB of VRAM in 1440p – far more than other recent games that have experienced video memory issues. Due to improper CPU utilization, outlets like Digital Foundry couldn't maintain 60fps with an RTX 4090 and Intel Core i9-12900K.

Modder PureDark recently posted a video (masthead) demonstrating the game with DLSS 3 frame generation, which uses the machine learning cores in Nvidia RTX 4000 series graphics cards to interpolate frames. The initial results contain artifacts but show the frame rate jumping from 45fps to 90fps. While the uplift doesn't improve input response, RTX 4000 GPU owners should at least notice a smoother image when the mod launches.

Adding DLSS to games through third-party mods isn't new, but the process usually only brings DLSS 2 to games that already include AMD's FSR 2, like the remake of Resident Evil 4. While Jedi: Survivor does feature FSR 2, its Denuvo DRM prevents PureDark from adding DLSS Super Resolution. Modding in DLSS 3 appears to be a new step that PureDark is also extending to other popular games.

Subscribers to the modder's Patreon can already download closed beta versions of Elden Ring and Skyrim upscaling mods, which include DLSS 3, DLSS 2, FSR, and XeSS, with plans to publicly release the mods for all three games after working out some kinks. The Elden Ring mod in particular appears to be nearing completion.

Meanwhile, EA released an official Jedi: Survivor update on Monday to fix bugs and improve performance, with ray tracing patches presumably still in the works. The same patch will arrive for the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series consoles on Tuesday, though the console versions haven't suffered from the same kind of performance problems.