# NVIDIA DLSS DLL version - future feature in GPU-Z



## VulkanBros (Jul 26, 2022)

Would be nice, to have that info in GPU-Z - if it is even possible.
As it is not, a "one system version" or "driver version" but a game specific version, it will have to scan, all game libraries, on all hard drives, in order to get, potential, multiple DLSS DLL versions.
Should be listed under "Advanced -> DLSS" - like Vulkan and CUDA.
Would make life easier, each time new DLSS versiones are dicovered and distributed - to change the files, in all game libraries.


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## W1zzard (Jul 26, 2022)

The DLL is part of the games, so you can have multiple versions installed.

Scanning through the game libraries isn't trivial, because you can basically store the games anywhere you want, so GPU-Z would have to scan all directories on all drives for the DLL.

I like your idea though, maybe scanning everything would be acceptable from a user perspective?

"Scanning" doesn't mean read the file contents, just look for the filename, like F3 search does in Explorer


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## VulkanBros (Jul 26, 2022)

The "scanning everything" part is what worries me, as it, as you said, could reside everywhere, the user has installed the games.

Maybe it should only be scanned, when the user enters the "Advanced" -> "DLSS" tab - as the user then will know, it will take time (a pop-up could inform of scanning time)


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## Chomiq (Jul 26, 2022)

Since when GPU-Z modifies anything? It's meant to read the data, not scan for and modify dll files. This would require a brand new dedicated software. DLSS updater or something like that.


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## VulkanBros (Jul 26, 2022)

Chomiq said:


> Since when GPU-Z modifies anything? It's meant to read the data, not scan for and modify dll files. This would require a brand new dedicated software. DLSS updater or something like that.


It´s not meant to change/update the DLSS files. It is for showing the DLSS version(s) and then make it easier for the user to change them.
But hey - the "DLSS Update" app sounds even better


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## W1zzard (Jul 26, 2022)

VulkanBros said:


> The "scanning everything" part is what worries me, as it, as you said, could reside everywhere, the user has installed the games.
> 
> Maybe it should only be scanned, when the user enters the "Advanced" -> "DLSS" tab - as the user then will know, it will take time (a pop-up could inform of scanning time)


Of course. It will start scanning when you enter the tab and show a message. When you navigate away from the tab it will stop scanning.



Chomiq said:


> Since when GPU-Z modifies anything? It's meant to read the data, not scan for and modify dll files. This would require a brand new dedicated software. DLSS updater or something like that.


No plans to allow "modify" from within GPU-Z. I think a "open folder" button will suffice, so people can do whatever they want in that folder, and can't blame GPU-Z


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## birdie (Jul 26, 2022)

GPU-Z is a utility about your GPU _hardware/physical_ (temperature, fan speed, power consumption) characteristics.

The DLSS library is a _software library_ for a particular game.

There's _zero_ relationship between them other then DLSS requiring an NVIDIA GPU. How much time will you take for you to right mouse click a particular DLL and click Properties?

Lastly, which directories and drives GPU-Z should scan? How much time are you willing to spend waiting for it to scan all of it? There are multiple ways this can fail as well, e.g. imagine you have a cloud directory mounted and your Internet connection is slow or limited. What about a network drive? A NAS drive?

This request makes _zero_ sense. No, not just senseless, it's outright evil and harmful.


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## Naki (Jul 26, 2022)

Support.

IF an easy way to back out/cancel exists, and GPU-Z also shows some kind of percentage done + an approximate ETA to be fully done, then I don't see why not to add this.


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## W1zzard (Jul 26, 2022)

Naki said:


> also shows some kind of percentage done + an approximate ETA to be fully done


not sure how. no way to know if you have 100 million files and directories in the folder zz-dont-open


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## Solaris17 (Jul 26, 2022)

I’m not really for this. I think that steps over the line of scope and starts putting GPU-Z in a category of something it is not. That’s just me though.


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## anfazi54 (Jul 27, 2022)

is it for only reading the data or modifiying too?


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## AusWolf (Jul 27, 2022)

As mentioned before, files of different DLSS versions are present in different games. Also, as far as I know, every card that supports DLSS supports every version, so GPU-Z showing version information would be meaningless. Also, Tensor cores can be used for various things other than DLSS which would mean more tick boxes and version information. It would be a mess.


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## Shihab (Jul 27, 2022)

VulkanBros said:


> Would make life easier, each time new DLSS versiones are dicovered and distributed - to change the files, in all game libraries.


Have a single dll somewhere and symlink all instances inside your DLSS-enabled games directories to it? If you can bare with a single game update affecting all... 

I also think this feature would be messy. I can already foresee the naive paranoid types popping in forums and subreddits accusing GPU-z of spying or something.


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## Vayra86 (Jul 27, 2022)

Less is more. Pointless feature


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## W1zzard (Jul 27, 2022)

http://imgur.com/LzvJoS0


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## BSim500 (Jul 27, 2022)

birdie said:


> GPU-Z is a utility about your GPU _hardware/physical_ (temperature, fan speed, power consumption) characteristics.
> 
> The DLSS library is a _software library_ for a particular game.
> 
> There's _zero_ relationship between them other then DLSS requiring an NVIDIA GPU. How much time will you take for you to right mouse click a particular DLL and click Properties?


^ This. Per-game DLSS version sounds like the kind of metadata more suited to putting into the API section of PCGamingWiki pages than bloating out hardware utilities with, otherwise where do you end? Get W1zzard to bloat out GPU-z to scan everything a 2nd, 3rd, etc, time for PhysX, Ansel, etc, which are just as equally GPU related? GPU-z / CPU-z are best kept "light and tight" as hardware centric utilities than software databases.


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## rethcirE (Jul 27, 2022)

Possibly a mute point but NVCleanstall 1.11 and beyond has a feature which displays on-screen the DLSS version in use; https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-nvcleanstall/



> Added a Tweaks option to show DLSS status and version overlay in-game


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## W1zzard (Jul 27, 2022)

Test build attached, feedback please


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## VulkanBros (Jul 28, 2022)

Have 3 games with Nvidia DLSS support: Chernobylite, DOOM Ethernal and Cyberpunk 2077 - all under the Valve/Steam hood (same local hard drive, in this case E:\)
but, unfortunately the scanning did not find any of them.
And it is scanning the E:\ drive, I can see...


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## W1zzard (Jul 28, 2022)

Let it finish


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## VulkanBros (Jul 28, 2022)

The first picture is when the scan is finished... 3 times run af the scan - same result
Maybe it only scans certain folders?

My F:\ drive is F:\Steam for the Steam games and the E:\ drive is E:\SteamLibrary - could it be that?
The game folders are on 3 local, separate 1 TB/500 GB SSD drives (D:\, E:\ and F:\)


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## W1zzard (Jul 28, 2022)

Oh ok .. it should go through all your (phsical) drives starting with C:, did you see that?


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## VulkanBros (Jul 28, 2022)

Yes - it scans all local hard drives - but does not find the DLSS files - have even disabled/paused all protection functions in ESET Endpoint Security - just to see if that had an influence


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## W1zzard (Jul 28, 2022)

How interesting. Thanks, I'll try to reproduce the issue locally


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## tabascosauz (Jul 28, 2022)

Displays a blank screen after finishing the scan. Ran it a couple times and followed the progress closely - it did seem to scan all my drives (all SSDs - 1TB NVMe, 1TB SATA, 1TB NVMe, 750GB external SATA), but upon finishing the last one (J:/) it just ends like this.

When going to another tab and then back it'll start a new scan but just do the same thing. It's certainly fast on these SSDs though, each is filled about 2/3.

There are at least 2 games in which I actively use DLSS (MW2019, No Man's Sky) on here.





Clicked the blank window and this came up


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## izy (Jul 28, 2022)

Same here , blank window after scan ends.


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## VulkanBros (Aug 18, 2022)

Stumbled upon this tool: dlss-swapper
Anyone tried that?

Works only with Steam installed games and apparently, or am I wrong, associated with TPU? https://beeradmoore.github.io/dlss-swapper/usage/


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## Solaris17 (Aug 18, 2022)

VulkanBros said:


> Stumbled upon this tool: dlss-swapper
> Anyone tried that?
> 
> Works only with Steam installed games and apparently, or am I wrong, associated with TPU? https://beeradmoore.github.io/dlss-swapper/usage/



Is not associated with us. Author isn’t w1zz and he is just getting the DLSS files from TPU.


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## W1zzard (Aug 19, 2022)

New build with several fixes for the DLSS scanner, please test and feedback


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## tabascosauz (Aug 19, 2022)

W1zzard said:


> New build with several fixes for the DLSS scanner, please test and feedback



Works like a charm, even found the collection of .dlls I had in my dropbox back when I was swapping between games


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## R00kie (Aug 19, 2022)

Works much better


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## izy (Aug 19, 2022)

Works ok now.


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## VulkanBros (Aug 19, 2022)

Works - thanks @W1zzard


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## RobertR (Aug 19, 2022)

Running on my Windows 11 Pro 22H2 "Insiders" build, Alder Lake CPU, RTX 3070 GPU...

Yup, seems to work, found Microsoft's Minecraft, as well as Death Stranding and DOOM Eternal.

HOWEVER, both Task Manager and Process Hacker report significant (multi-MB/s) disk WRITE activity while this "scan" is proceeding... this activity stops instantly if I kill the DLSS scan.

Comments and/or confirmations?


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## W1zzard (Aug 19, 2022)

RobertR said:


> HOWEVER, both Task Manager and Process Hacker report significant (multi-MB/s) disk WRITE activity while this "scan" is proceeding... this activity stops instantly if I kill the DLSS scan.
> 
> Comments and/or confirmations?


It shouldn't be writing anything, it goes through all files in all directories and checks if the filename is "nvngx_dlss.dll"

Can you reproduce? anyone else?


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## izy (Aug 19, 2022)

W1zzard said:


> It shouldn't be writing anything, it goes through all files in all directories and checks if the filename is "nvngx_dlss.dll"
> 
> Can you reproduce? anyone else?


Yes , he is right , disk writes spike up to 20MB/s each second or so while scanning.




Edit: i saw even 30MB/s.


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## W1zzard (Aug 19, 2022)

Confirmed, very strange, I'm not writing anything, you can check with Process Monitor

edit: When you use Resource Monitor you can see that GPU-Z isn't writing anything, but "System" is writing to the Master File Table on the disk, which suggests to me that NTFS is updating some kind of "last file access" data


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## izy (Aug 19, 2022)

W1zzard said:


> Confirmed, very strange, I'm not writing anything, you can check with Process Monitor
> 
> edit: When you use Resource Monitor you can see that GPU-Z isn't writing anything, but "System" is writing to the Master File Table on the disk, which suggests to me that NTFS is updating some kind of "last file access" data


I did a normal windows search and it seems that is the normal behavior while searching, its doing the same thing.


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## RobertR (Aug 19, 2022)

I am inclined to agree with W1zzard's theory on the "last access" thing... I ran my own app that walks the entire file tree, and see the same thing.

So, likely nothing all that weird going on.


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## izy (Aug 19, 2022)

I used another app (FileSeek , it helps me find stuff faster in files) and task manager reports disk writes same as gpu-z dlss search or native windows search. (maybe it has something to do with windows indexing?  i am on windows 10)


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## W1zzard (Aug 19, 2022)

New build with improved file&directory access, runs quite a bit faster on SSDs


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## izy (Aug 19, 2022)

W1zzard said:


> New build with improved file&directory access, runs quite a bit faster on SSDs


Now disk writes are in bursts of 100MB/s+ on SSDs and yes its faster.
EDIT: I think maybe its a good idea to have an option for selecting the directory / partition / disk to search in. (many people are not installing any games in the windows partition / drive)


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## RobertR (Aug 19, 2022)

In case this is still of interest...

I recalled that this aspect of NTFS may be enabled or disabled (for performance considerations).

I pretty good tutorial on the subject may be seen at

Enable or Disable NTFS Last Access Time Stamp Updates in Windows 10 | Tutorials (tenforums.com)

Two observations on this:

1) if you set this to "User Managed ... Disabled", then these updates will stay OFF - if you use "System Managed ... Disabled", then any change to this setting will be reverted at the next boot

2) My Win 11 told me that "
This operation takes effect immediately (no reboot required)
"

... so apparently this is a bit easier to use than previously.

And yes, things go very fast, with ZERO writes happening during the scan.


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## birdie (Aug 20, 2022)

@W1zzard 









						How do I access a file without updating its last-access time?
					

The first problem with discussing file last-access time is agreeing what you mean by a file’s last-access time.  The file system folks have one definition of the file last-access time, namely the time the file was most recently opened and either read from or written to.




					devblogs.microsoft.com


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## W1zzard (Aug 20, 2022)

This latest build shouldn't change the access times, not sure why there's still disk write activity, seems to be just the way Windows works


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## VulkanBros (Aug 22, 2022)

GPU-Z 2.46.6 is considerably faster than the previous version - thanks


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## neatfeatguy (Sep 7, 2022)

Techspot posted about the new GPU-Z DLSS check function for their download of the week posting.









						GPU-Z
					

GPU-Z is a lightweight utility designed to give you all information about your GPU.




					www.techspot.com


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## regorwin56 (Sep 17, 2022)

Switching GPUZ to DLSS will cause high hard disk usage and take some time when scanning. I wonder if GPUZ can ask whether to scan before starting the scan.

I think GPUZ can't find games with DLSS support when  It can prompt the user that the game that supports DLSS is not found (just like switching to the DX12 column on a card that does not support DX12 will also prompt GPUZ), which is better than GPUZ showing a blank window when no game that supports DLSS is found. Users can better understand scan results


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## Mussels (Sep 17, 2022)

Yeah i dont think this is a great idea either, it'll cause disk activity on potentially really slow or busy drives and could set people off from a security perspective


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## izy (Sep 17, 2022)

Maybe its a good idea to have a database with games that are supporting DLSS and check first if user has any of those games installed and if it does to check the DLSS version from the installed directory of the game (or scan only that game directory for the file), scanning all computer and high disk usage its kinda not practical or as i posted before it could been nice to have an option to select the directory where you want to scan (like your game directory , steam library etc.)
Edit: It can be a problem maybe with cracked games that are not in the registered as installed app  but you can have that DLSS database + selected drive / folder scan ... just an idea


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## regorwin56 (Sep 17, 2022)

Mussels said:


> Yeah i dont think this is a great idea either, it'll cause disk activity on potentially really slow or busy drives and could set people off from a security perspective


I think this function of finding DLSS is very useful for some people, but I really think that when switching to this window, it is necessary to ask the user first and mention these problems (high hard disk usage and long search time)



Mussels said:


> Yeah i dont think this is a great idea either, it'll cause disk activity on potentially really slow or busy drives and could set people off from a security perspective


In fact, this function has also been made. Some users should also need this function. It would be a pity if it was completely abandoned, so I think it is best to tell the user about this high-occupancy and time-consuming thing before starting the scan. Ask the user if they need it need to scan



izy said:


> Maybe its a good idea to have a database with games that are supporting DLSS and check first if user has any of those games installed and if it does to check the DLSS version from the installed directory of the game (or scan only that game directory for the file), scanning all computer and high disk usage its kinda not practical or as i posted before it could been nice to have an option to select the directory where you want to scan (like your game directory , steam library etc.)
> Edit: It can be a problem maybe with cracked games that are not in the registered as installed app  but you can have that DLSS database + selected drive / folder scan ... just an idea


You mentioned letting the user choose to scan only part of the range, I think it is very good, I think this can provide options for the user to choose



izy said:


> Maybe its a good idea to have a database with games that are supporting DLSS and check first if user has any of those games installed and if it does to check the DLSS version from the installed directory of the game (or scan only that game directory for the file), scanning all computer and high disk usage its kinda not practical or as i posted before it could been nice to have an option to select the directory where you want to scan (like your game directory , steam library etc.)
> Edit: It can be a problem maybe with cracked games that are not in the registered as installed app  but you can have that DLSS database + selected drive / folder scan ... just an idea


It allows users to choose whether they need to scan all hard disks or only need to scan a specified range. I think it is good



W1zzard said:


> The DLL is part of the games, so you can have multiple versions installed.
> 
> Scanning through the game libraries isn't trivial, because you can basically store the games anywhere you want, so GPU-Z would have to scan all directories on all drives for the DLL.
> 
> ...


What do you think of it


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## W1zzard (Sep 18, 2022)

Good suggestions I think I can add the following improvements:

- Add a button/link that needs to be clicked before the scan is started
- Add a list of drives in the system that can be checked on or off
- As mentioned in PM, enable the feature on all cards, not only on NVIDIA (it doesn't "use" DLSS, it only scans for games with DLSS support)


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## regorwin56 (Sep 18, 2022)

W1zzard said:


> Good suggestions I think I can add the following improvements:
> 
> - Add a button/link that needs to be clicked before the scan is started
> - Add a list of drives in the system that can be checked on or off
> - As mentioned in PM, enable the feature on all cards, not only on NVIDIA (it doesn't "use" DLSS, it only scans for games with DLSS support)


Does the improved DLSS scan still just query the "nvngx_dlss.dll" file?

Does the improved GPUZ scan still provide the option to perform the same mode as the current GPUZ 2.48 that scans all hard drives

Provides the same option as GPU Z 2.48 to perform a full search of computer hard drives


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## W1zzard (Sep 18, 2022)

Yes of course


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## regorwin56 (Sep 18, 2022)

W1zzard said:


> Yes of course


Understand Hope to see these improvements take effect in the next version


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## izy (Sep 18, 2022)

W1zzard said:


> Good suggestions I think I can add the following improvements:
> 
> - Add a button/link that needs to be clicked before the scan is started
> - Add a list of drives in the system that can be checked on or off
> - As mentioned in PM, enable the feature on all cards, not only on NVIDIA (it doesn't "use" DLSS, it only scans for games with DLSS support)


Is it not possible to check the registry for the installed games and their install path and just scan for DLSS on the specific path?


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## W1zzard (Sep 18, 2022)

izy said:


> Is it not possible to check the registry for the installed games and their install path and just scan for DLSS on the specific path?


Not really, there is no universal standard and it won't catch games that you just copy around without installation. Maybe finding the Steam library folder could be an option and scan this first, to have some results faster


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## W1zzard (Sep 20, 2022)

W1zzard said:


> Good suggestions I think I can add the following improvements:


Didn't have time to add them for today's release, but I had to push out the Zen 4 support, so reviewers can do their job.


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## regorwin56 (Oct 5, 2022)

I think if GPU Z scans DLSS halfway and the user cancels it, it can also prompt that you have canceled the scan

There is also an option to rescan if the user accidentally cancels the scan

I also thought of a way to allow GPUZ to temporarily stop DLSS scanning and provide options that allow the user to continue the unfinished scan or abandon the unfinished scan.

  Want to know what other people think


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## VulkanBros (Oct 26, 2022)

Interesting - Chernobylite just updated through Steam - and it has replaced the nvvgx_dlss.dll file with an older version.
My guess was, that it would keep/not replace it, if it where newer version, but apparently thats not the case......


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## VulkanBros (Sunday at 1:54 PM)

Is "nvngx_dlssg.dll" also covered by GPU-Z ?


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## W1zzard (Sunday at 3:37 PM)

VulkanBros said:


> Is "nvngx_dlssg.dll" also covered by GPU-Z ?
> View attachment 278152​


Not yet


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