HelixSR 3.1.0, released on GitHub on October 28, makes HLX FSR 4 a standalone upscaler: AMD’s FSR 4 neural network, rebuilt to run on GPUs AMD never shipped it to, including the Steam Deck’s RDNA 2 chip, NVIDIA’s GTX 10 and 16 series and AMD’s own RX 5000 and RX 400/500 cards. It installs as a drop-in for any game that already supports FSR 3.1, by swapping one DLL, and the release notes say games with anti-cheat are now treated like any other.
HelixSR started as a way to run NVIDIA’s DLSS network (its “Model E” upscaler) on AMD hardware as plain Direct3D 12 compute shaders, without Tensor Cores, an NVIDIA driver, CUDA or ROCm. Version 3.0, a pre-release from October 27, added the FSR 4 half. Version 3.1 is the first full release with both.
FSR 4 on the Steam Deck, GTX 16 and RX 5000, built on your own PC
AMD limits FSR 4 to RDNA 4 (the RX 9000 series) with an RDNA 3 path for RX 7000 cards. HLX FSR 4 runs the same network on HelixSR’s own pipeline instead, so it works on RDNA 1 and 2, which covers the RX 5000 and RX 6000 series and the Steam Deck. The setup builds the shaders on your machine from AMD’s own driver file (amdxcffx64.dll from AMD Software 26.10.1), downloading about 420 MB of the driver package once and reading only that file out of it; nothing is installed. Every shader is checked against a tested one. GTX 16 cards use an 8-bit INT8 path, GTX 10 cards and Polaris RX 400/500 cards get 32-bit versions because they have no fast 16-bit math.
What 3.1 changes: FSR 4 as its own option, Vulkan DLSS, and a speed test
In HelixSR Scaler’s upscaler list, HLX FSR 4 now has its own line next to AMD’s FSR, and on RX 7000 and RX 9000 cards AMD’s real FSR 4 is listed again with its presets. A new prepass and post pass make HLX FSR 4 faster on AMD GPUs with the same picture “bit for bit.” HLX DLSS, the DLSS-network upscaler, now works in Vulkan games through HelixSR Scaler, the way it already did in DirectX 11 titles, and GTX 10 cards get back faster conversions that 3.0 had dropped. The setup now lists only games, skips programs it finds in Steam shortcuts, and lets you type a letter per game: s for HelixSR Scaler, f for the FSR drop-in.
HelixSR Desktop 1.3.0, the optional app, adds a speed test that times every HLX FSR 4 version, HLX DLSS and, where present, AMD’s FSR 4 on your GPU, then checks which produce identical output. The author asks users to paste the results into a GitHub issue to help tune the project for more cards. The test is based on a GPL-licensed FSR 4.1.1 timing kit by zgauthier2000.
1.10 ms at 1080p on the BC-250, 1.85 ms on a GTX 1660 Ti
The project’s reference GPU is the BC-250, AMD’s RDNA 2 mining board. On it, HLX FSR 4 in Quality mode costs 1.10 ms of GPU time per frame at 1080p, 1.90 ms at 1440p and 4.21 ms at 4K, against 1.04, 1.60 and 3.40 ms for HLX DLSS. Today’s follow-up update picks the fastest build per card: 1.85 ms instead of 3.00 ms at 1080p on a GTX 1660 Ti, and 4.11 ms instead of 7.33 ms on an RX 480. The README links a Red Dead Redemption 2 comparison on an RX 5700 XT with slider images against FSR 3.1.5.
How it installs, and what it will not do
Download the 3.1.0 ZIP, extract it into a folder you keep, close your games, and run helixsr-setup.bat on Windows or helixsr-setup.sh in a terminal on Linux or the Steam Deck’s Desktop Mode, where the shader build needs Proton or Wine. The setup lists your games; for each one, the FSR drop-in replaces only the game’s FSR 3.1 file, keeps the original, and you select AMD FSR in the game’s own menu. HelixSR Scaler, the bundled fork of OptiScaler, handles games without FSR 3.1 and stores its settings in the game’s OptiScaler.ini. Windows users can take the HelixSR Desktop app instead, which installs and updates per game.
The limits are spelled out in the README. There is no HelixSR frame generation in the 3.x releases; AMD FSR and Intel XeSS frame generation remain in the Scaler menu, and HelixSR 2.0.0 keeps the old DLSS frame generation. Older GPUs are the focus: RDNA 3 and newer “may work” but are not guaranteed. Today’s refresh also rolled RX 5000 cards back to the pre-3.1 HLX FSR 4 builds after a reported crash, and the upscaler now falls back to AMD’s own FSR instead of crashing the game if it cannot start. HelixSR is freeware with unpublished source code; the setup downloads NVIDIA’s and AMD’s network files itself, and the ZIP contains none of them.
On r/SteamDeck the first reactions were from people who had already tried the DLSS half. One said a Cyberpunk 2077 test last month “really impressed me,” another planned to try it with Hogwarts Legacy, and the open question was whether HLX FSR 4 beats the lightweight FSR 4.1.2 build on the Deck, which is exactly what the new speed test is for.
HelixSR Adds Custom HLX FSR 4 Upscaler With 3.1 Update – SteamDeckHQ
byu/BBQKITTY inSteamDeck
