Apex Compute released an open beta for a neural rendering suite on Wednesday claiming its frame generation outperforms Nvidia DLSS while supporting hardware dating back to the GeForce GTX 16 series.
Nvidia restricts its AI-driven frame generation to the RTX 40 and 50 series graphics cards. Apex Compute claims its alternative runs on Nvidia GTX 16 and newer, AMD Radeon RX 5000 and newer, Intel Arc A- and B-series, Apple M1 and later, and the Steam Deck.
Users can download the open beta from the company’s website or its GitHub repository. Super resolution and ray reconstruction components remain under development.
Internal benchmarks from Apex Compute’s GitHub repository show that 2x frame generation on an RTX 5090 at 4K costs 1.01 milliseconds per generated frame. Nvidia DLSS takes 1.26 milliseconds for the same task.
Apex also claims to cut VRAM usage by about 62%. DLSS uses 562MB of VRAM, while the new solution drops that requirement to 214MB.
Introducing Apex Neural Rendering (ANR), our cross-platform Super Resolution, Ray Reconstruction, and Frame Generation technology, delivering up to 2.4× faster performance and higher quality rendering than NVIDIA DLSS. ANR rebuilds neural rendering around a new architecture that… pic.twitter.com/DcSkwrouKS
Video footage uploaded by Apex demonstrates that its frame generation results in reduced ghosting compared to DLSS when playing The Last of Us Part II and Hogwarts Legacy. The software runs through OptiScaler, providing separate packages for games that already include it.
To use the software, users must launch a game once and close it, extract the downloaded archive, run the installer from the folder containing the game executable, restart the game, and enable DLSS frame generation if available.
Contained within the GitHub repository is a utility designed to perform lossless captures of frame generation data, which can then be replayed via rival platforms to facilitate direct side-by-side analysis.
Meanwhile, modders have produced another option for Radeon owners. By utilizing the DLSS-NR-on-AMD mod, users can access DLSS 5 neural rendering, frame generation, super resolution, and ray reconstruction on AMD Radeon RX 6000 and newer GPUs while playing DirectX 12 games on Windows 11 that feature support for XeSS, FSR, or DLSS.
Apex has not yet released its source code or fully explained the underlying technology behind its neural rendering suite.
