NVIDIA's DLSS 5 neural renderer, applied to your whole Windows desktop in real time. Everything on screen — games, video, photos — goes through the same neural network that DLSS 5 games use, and comes back sharper.
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Everything lives in one menu inside the overlay. The Before / after wipe slider splits the screen down the middle so you can see what the effect is actually doing.
- Windows 11
- An NVIDIA RTX card. 50-series is the officially supported one. 20, 30 and 40-series work too — the kernels are there and NVIDIA's own check is what blocks them; NeuralScreen works around it. Confirmed working on a 40-series.
- Nothing installed. The release archive brings its own Python.
- Download the archive from Releases
and unpack it anywhere. Everything is inside — including NVIDIA's
nvngx_dlssnr.dll(165 MB, too big for GitHub to keep in the repository, so it ships in the archive instead). - Run
NeuralScreen.exe.
Windows will probably warn you about an unknown publisher the first time — the
program is not signed with a paid certificate. Click More info → Run
anyway. If you would rather not, NeuralScreen.vbs next to it does the same
thing.
There is no installer and nothing is written outside the folder. To remove it, delete the folder.
Do not use it in competitive online games. A process named
nvngx.dllplus a fullscreen overlay is exactly what anti-cheat systems look for.
The program sits in the tray and draws over your desktop. Press Num2 for the menu. The hotkeys live on the numpad, so Num Lock has to be on - with it off those keys send Insert/End/arrows instead and nothing happens.
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| Num2 | open / close the menu |
| Num1 | neural rendering on / off |
| Num3 | screenshot |
| Num0 | start / stop recording, with sound |
| Num4 / Num6 | processing resolution down / up |
| Num5 | process one window instead of the whole screen |
| Ctrl+Alt+Q | quit |
Every key can be reassigned in the menu, under the sliders icon.
While the menu is open it takes the mouse and keyboard, so it works on top of a game. Closed, clicks go straight through it as if it were not there.
Num5 points everything at a single window — the one under the mouse cursor (falling back to the last focused window) — and the overlay sits on that window and follows it. Num5 again goes back to the whole screen.
There is one practical reason to use it: in this mode OBS and the NVIDIA App can see the processed picture. Whole-screen mode has to hide the overlay from screen capture, otherwise the program would capture its own output and feed on it — and with the NVIDIA App that hiding does not merely make the overlay invisible, it stops the recording from starting at all. One window has no such loop, so nothing has to hide.
To record the processed picture with the NVIDIA App: point the mouse at the window you want (a game in windowed/borderless mode, a browser, anything), press Num5, then start the recording. The overlay and the processed picture are now part of the screen capture. Press Num5 again to go back to the whole screen.
The desktop itself is not a window: pressing Num5 while pointing at the wallpaper captures the last real window instead.
Minimise the window and processing stops with it; restore it and the picture comes back.
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The dot next to your graphics card is green when neural rendering is actually running on it, red when it is not.
The settings worth touching:
- Profile — how strong the effect is, from Faithful to Extreme. Start at Strong / Cinematic and go from there. The four sliders underneath are the same thing in detail.
- Before / after wipe — leaves the left part of the screen untouched so you can see what the effect is actually doing. Set it back to 0 when you are done looking.
- Resolution the network runs at — one slider. At the top it is your whole screen, which is the default and the best picture. Every step down hands the network a smaller frame: with the slider off the default (full screen) the network is already at its best, and every step down means roughly 50% more frames at 2560×1440 on a 4K screen. The picture stays sharp: the network's result is composed onto the pristine 1:1 native frame (a matched residual composite), so text, edges and UI keep full resolution while the cheap low-res network does the relighting. Look at your own screen and pick a step.
Everything else — which monitor, whether the menu opens on launch, starting with Windows, key assignments — is behind the sliders icon.
Num0 records what you see, with the system sound, into an MP4 in
recordings. Num3 saves a screenshot. If the menu is open it appears in
both, on purpose.
Recording has to be done from inside the program: OBS, ShadowPlay and NVIDIA App cannot see the overlay. That is deliberate — the program captures your screen in order to process it, so if its own output were visible to capture it would feed on itself.
In one-window mode (Num5) the input is a single window instead of the desktop, so there is no self-capture loop: the overlay stops hiding from screen capture, and external recorders (OBS display capture, NVIDIA App) see the processed picture. Full-screen mode keeps hiding it.
Nothing appears after launch. Check NeuralScreen.log next to the program;
it says what happened in plain text. The most common cause is a missing
native\nvngx_dlssnr.dll.
The overlay is invisible in a game. Games running in true fullscreen cannot have anything drawn over them — that is a Windows rule, not a bug here. Switch the game to borderless or windowed fullscreen, which almost all modern games have.
The menu pointer is missing or frozen. A fullscreen game hides the system cursor, and the game's own cursor (drawn into its frames) freezes when the game loses focus to the menu. The overlay only shows the system cursor; a game that hides it leaves the menu without a pointer. Switching the game to borderless fixes it.
The numpad hotkeys do nothing. They need Num Lock to be on. With Num Lock off the numpad sends Insert/End/arrows and the keys simply do not exist. The program writes this to the log and shows it on screen.
The picture is soft. Put Resolution the network runs at back to the top of its slider. (With the residual composite the picture stays sharp down to the reduced resolutions; only the very bottom of the slider starts to soften.)
A key does nothing. Something else on the machine has claimed it. Reassign it in the menu under the sliders icon.
The menu is slow to react in a heavy game. At 4K with a demanding scene the pipeline can take up to a second per frame, and the hotkeys are processed between frames — a press may feel lost. The picture itself is the priority; the menu catches up when the load drops.
- True fullscreen games cannot have the overlay drawn over them — that is a Windows rule. Borderless or windowed only.
- A second instance of the program is not guarded. Two copies fight over the screen capture; the tests refuse to run while one is up, but the program itself does not stop you. Close the first one before starting another.
- The window list in the menu shows every visible window; picking one switches to it. Num5 still takes the window under the cursor for the quick path.
- A second monitor is supported but was not tested with a window between monitors.
- The menu position in window mode starts in the bottom-right corner of the screen on every open; drag it where you want and it is remembered on close.
How it works, what was measured and why the decisions went the way they did: docs/TECHNICAL.md.
Русская версия: README.ru.md.
The code here is MIT. NVIDIA's nvngx_dlssnr.dll is not mine and is not
included — it comes from NVIDIA under their own terms.