Echo-Storm/ls-addon-manager

Lossless Scaling, extended.
DLSS 5 Neural Rendering, DLSS, FSR and XeSS upscaling for games that never had them, and an addon manager that keeps it all in one window.

Addon Manager for Lossless Scaling loads alongside Lossless Scaling and gives it an addon system, with four addons that do what Lossless Scaling alone cannot:

• DLSS 5 Neural Rendering gives any game a new look, on every frame Lossless Scaling shows.
• The DLSS, FSR and XeSS Upscalers put a real temporal upscaler in place of Lossless Scaling's NIS scaler, so games that never had one get one.

Around them, the manager installs and switches addons, shows the machine's load at a glance, explains what limits your frame rate, backs every setting up and updates itself. It is free, MIT-licensed and unofficial: not affiliated with the Lossless Scaling developers. Read the disclaimer before installing.

  0.9.32, on the way to 1.0 (roadmap)  ·  Lossless Scaling 3.2.2.0  ·  Windows 10 or 11, x64

_{Silent Hill f (Unreal Engine 5, HDR) through Lossless Scaling: the original above, DLSS 5 Neural Rendering below.}

Tried with World of Warcraft: Forever, Fallout: New Vegas (Tale of Two Wastelands), Silent Hill f (HDR) and Metro 2033 Redux, on an RTX 4070 Ti SUPER and Windows 11. Other games and cards are untested so far: reports are welcome.

• Install
• The addons: Neural Rendering, the upscalers, built-in features
• The manager · Hotkeys · Updates · If something goes wrong
• For developers: how it works, building, writing an addon · Credits

1. Download LSAddonManager-<version>-x64.zip from the releases page and unzip it.
2. Close Lossless Scaling and run LSAddonManagerSetup.exe. It finds your Lossless Scaling folder (Steam or not; otherwise choose Use a different folder...) and offers what fits: Install, Update, Repair or Uninstall.
3. Start Lossless Scaling. The manager opens by itself. Neural Rendering is on; the upscalers are off until you switch one on.

Setup, before installing

Setup, when it is done

What Setup does:

• Keeps Lossless Scaling's own Lossless.dll as Lossless_original.dll (the manager forwards to it) and puts ours in, with the addons folder.
• Backs up everything it replaces into a backups folder, checks every file after copying, and puts the folder back as it was if anything fails.
• Never touches your settings or your other addons, and refuses to run while Lossless Scaling runs from that folder.
• After a Lossless Scaling update (which may put its own Lossless.dll back), run it again: it offers Repair.
• Asks for administrator rights only when the folder needs them (Program Files, for example).

Like every file here, Setup is unsigned, so Windows SmartScreen may warn you: choose More info, then Run anyway. Its source is in installer/.

Every runtime the upscalers need comes with them. Only one upscaler runs at a time; any of them works beside Neural Rendering.

Runs NVIDIA's DLSS 5 neural model on Lossless Scaling's frames and puts the result on every frame it presents, real and generated, without ever making Lossless Scaling wait.

• Frame generation on or off. With it on, the model's result is carried onto the generated frames along the motion; with it off, the model takes the presented frames.
• Its own motion measurement, per pixel, so the picture holds together while the camera turns.
• Looks: saved sets of sliders, a look per game that follows the game in focus, and a hotkey to cycle them.
• Keep the HUD untouched: draw the areas the model must leave alone (action bars, chat, the minimap) on a snapshot of the game.
• Picture controls: intensity, fine detail, local contrast, skin detail, sharpening, tone, colour, shadows and highlights, film grain, temporal smoothing, and a ghost guard where the motion cannot be trusted.
• HDR games (scRGB and HDR10), with only the model's change put back, so highlights keep their brightness.
• Compare while you play: before / after, a split view, and before / after pictures (see Hotkeys).
• Auto quality keeps the model within a time budget; a compatibility test tries the model on your card before you play.

About 5 to 9 ms a frame on an RTX 4070 Ti SUPER with a 1912x1080 model input (8.5 ms at 4K in World of Warcraft). The addon's README has the details.

Lossless Scaling scales a game window up to the screen one frame at a time. The upscalers put a temporal upscaler in its place: it reads several frames and the motion between them, for a steadier picture with cleaner, smoother edges. The game needs no support for it: the addons measure the motion from the frames themselves. What it cannot do is add detail the game did not render: a game gives its own upscaler a tiny camera shift every frame, which is where a temporal upscaler finds extra detail, and Lossless Scaling's frames carry none. Measured on recordings (docs/frame-generation-research.md): where the picture moves the addons lean on a resample of the frame (no trailing), and at rest the upscaler smooths (the Sharpness at rest slider trades some of that back for sharpness).

To use one: switch it on in the addon list, choose NIS as the Scaling Type in Lossless Scaling, and run the game in a window smaller than the screen (for example 2560x1440 on a 4K screen). At the screen's own size it anti-aliases instead.

Which one? On an NVIDIA RTX card, try DLSS and FSR 4. On any other card, FSR, and XeSS on Intel Arc. All three are tried in World of Warcraft.

What all three do:

• Every presented frame, real and generated, with frame generation on or off.
• HDR games (scRGB and HDR10) in the upscaler's own HDR mode, highlights kept; Frame encoding overrides the automatic choice.
• 4:3 and other window shapes, upscaled into the part of the screen Lossless Scaling uses, borders left alone.
• Steady in fast motion: Lossless Scaling gives an upscaler none of the camera jitter a game gives it, so in motion its memory of earlier frames only trails; where the picture moves, ours leans on the new frame (Lean from sets from how much motion).
• Stability (less shimmer on wires and leaves), edge smoothing for games without anti-aliasing, and sharpening well past the upscaler's own.
• Colour and tone (vibrance, saturation, shadows, highlights, brightness, contrast, gamma), applied before upscaling, so they cost nothing.
• Settings per game, which come back when the game takes focus.
• Before / after against NIS while you play, and a line of live numbers.

What they cost on an RTX 4070 Ti SUPER, everything included (the 1:1 row: 0.9.14, live in World of Warcraft, the motion estimate included):

FSR 4 costs more than FSR 3.1; the panel's status line shows what it takes on your card. If the game has its own anti-aliasing (MSAA), switch it on: it draws what no upscaler can put back. The upscalers' guide covers every setting.

Built into the manager, on its Features tab, both off until switched on:

• ReShade input passthrough: mouse and keyboard reach a ReShade overlay while Lossless Scaling scales the game. Home turns it on and off.
• Windowed mode and second monitor: a virtual display the size of your game window, so Lossless Scaling works with a windowed game or on a second monitor, with split-screen and side-by-side options. Switching it on needs a restart of Lossless Scaling.

• The machine at a glance: the header shows the graphics card's load and memory, system memory and the processor, on every tab.
• A Performance tab that explains itself: frame rate and frame times, what each addon costs, the GPU's load, power, clocks, temperature and memory, and a plain-words reading such as "the GPU is at its power limit".
• Addons without touching folders: install from a folder, a zip or a DLL (or drop one on the window); Remove moves an addon aside, nothing is erased.
• Runtimes list: every file the addons run on (DLSS, FSR, XeSS, your model) with its version, whether it is loaded, and whether it is signed as its maker shipped it. + switches to another file while the game runs.

  

• Record a bug: an addon keeps the last few seconds of frames and saves them as a file that plays the problem back on another computer.
• Stays out of the way: it opens with Lossless Scaling, hides to the notification area, and comes back with a click or Ctrl+Shift+F12.
• Back up and restore every setting to one file, and a diagnostics zip of logs and settings for a bug report (nothing is uploaded).
• Safe by design: a faulting addon cannot take Lossless Scaling down, settings are written atomically, and optional SHA-256 checks guard addon DLLs.
• Interface size from 75% to 200%, sharp on any display.

Closing the window stops nothing: the manager hides to the notification area (Windows may keep its icon under the ^ arrow by the clock).

Performance

Settings

They work while the game has focus. The game sees the key too, so the defaults keep away from keys games often use alone (F5, F6, F9, F11). If one clashes in your game, change it in the addon's Compare and hotkeys section.

Once a day the manager asks GitHub whether there is a newer release (on by default; Settings > Updates turns it off, Check now always works). When there is, it asks once:

• Download and install downloads the release, checks its size and SHA-256 against GitHub's and that the Setup inside is that version, then updates when you close Lossless Scaling and starts it again. Your settings carry over.
• Not now asks again after the next check; Don't ask again for this release waits for a newer one (the About tab still offers it).

That check, and a download you ask for, are the only times the manager goes online. To update by hand, download the zip and run Setup: it offers Update.

LosslessScaling.exe
  └─ loads Lossless.dll          <- the manager, in the original's place
       ├─ loads Lossless_original.dll (the real engine) and forwards its exports untouched
       ├─ watches Direct3D 11 compute work and shader loading, for addons that ask
       ├─ loads the addons from addons\
       └─ draws its window with Dear ImGui on its own thread

Nothing in Lossless Scaling is patched on disk, and removing the manager puts everything back. Addons share the manager's Dear ImGui context, so their settings appear inline in the same look.

The addons do their GPU work on a Direct3D 12 device of their own, beside Lossless Scaling's Direct3D 11 one; they share textures and fences, every wait between them is a GPU wait, and NVIDIA's, AMD's and Intel's code runs on a thread of the addon's own, so Lossless Scaling's render thread never stops for an addon. Neural Rendering hooks the frame Lossless Scaling captures or presents; the upscalers recognise its NIS pass and put their picture in its output. The architecture notes have more.

Visual Studio 2022 (Desktop C++) and CMake 3.20+. Dear ImGui and MinHook are fetched at pinned versions on first configure.

powershell -File tools\build_all.ps1              # the manager and the addons (-Only host: the manager only)
powershell -File tools\run_addon_tests.ps1        # the offline tests for what changed (-All: everything, as before a release)
powershell -File tools\ci.ps1                     # what the GitHub build runs: manager, installer, sample addon, and the tests that need no GPU
powershell -File tools\package.ps1                # the release zip, with Setup built around the files
powershell -File tools\deploy.ps1 -What all       # copy a build into a Lossless Scaling folder, with backups

The addons also need their vendors' SDKs, which are not in this repository. Each script fetches from the vendor's own repository and checks what it gets:

The offline test host and its scenarios (tools\run_hosttest_matrix.py) exercise every addon path without Lossless Scaling or a game. The tools README lists every script.

Addons written for LosslessProxy load unchanged: the interface began as LosslessProxy's and has only grown at the end. An addon with a settings panel should still be rebuilt against this SDK (manager/sdk/include/eam), since the manager pins its own Dear ImGui; if a panel faults anyway, the manager switches that panel off instead of going down with it.

Start from the sample addon, a small, tested addon with settings, a panel, a status line and a metric. Then read docs/addon-authors.md for the exports, the host interface and the shared look, and docs/api-compatibility.md for what the 1.0 interface promises.

This project began as LosslessProxy by FrankBarretta, with thanks: its proxy Lossless.dll with addons, its addon interface and the ReShade and Windowed features. The manager has since been rewritten; about a tenth of its lines still match the original's. Neural Rendering began as andreiday's DLSS 5 plugin for LosslessProxy and has been rewritten and extended here.

The upscalers run NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR 4 as built by the OptiScaler team, with thanks) and Intel XeSS; their motion measurement, stability and edge smoothing are this project's own. The full list, with licences, is in NOTICE.md. NVIDIA, DLSS, AMD, FidelityFX, FSR, Intel and XeSS are trademarks of their owners; this project is not affiliated with or endorsed by them. Lossless Scaling belongs to its author; this project is unofficial.

If it is useful to you, you can support it on Ko-fi.

MIT licence · Changelog · Roadmap · Questions and answers