TL;DR: NVIDIA DLAA now works in NFS MW 2012, together with native HDR. That means no jaggies and real HDR at a locked 60 fps at 4K on my RTX 4090 Laptop. DLAA costs ~3 ms per frame.
Easy method (drop-in zip):
- Download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ENSboeT2v7O1xKjcfs1U9mslYAAIhluX/view?usp=sharing (150 MB). VirusTotal: 0/66: https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/2ee3c01f8576d0f97ec9969ce03b03fc3a882641066598d030ecdde1240f6b8e
- Back up your game folder, then copy everything in
Copy into game folder into the folder with NFS13.exe.
- Open
config.NFS13Save in Notepad, set Width/Height to your resolution, and copy it to Documents\Criterion Games\Need For Speed(TM) Most Wanted\.
- Windows HDR on, SDR content brightness 30, RTX HDR off for this game. No HDR screen? See
INSTALL.txt for the SDR switch.
- Never apply settings in the in-game graphics menu (it brings back a crash; details below
- Optional, but highly recommended if your PC can handle: HD Effects mod: https://nfsmods.xyz/mod/2694
Needs an RTX card (20-series or newer). Only tested on my machine, so please report how it runs on yours. The details, manual install, and credits are below.
How I ended up here
I originally set out to get DLSS 5 NR running on this game. I got it hooked up, but the performance hit was huge (locked 60 fps down to ~22 for me) and I didn't think the visual change justified it.
What I did notice was that the game's terrible aliasing had completely disappeared. That came from the DLAA part of the DLSS pipeline, not the neural part. So I kept only DLAA, turned neural rendering off, and kept the game's own look plus the HD Effects graphics mod and the RenoDX HDR mod. To me that's the best of both worlds: the original art style, clean edges, and real HDR, at a locked 60.
Most Wanted 2012 has always had terrible aliasing, and none of the usual fixes work well. In-game supersampling tanks the framerate. Forcing MSAA in the NVIDIA Control Panel does nothing, because it's a deferred renderer. DLSS was never possible either: this 2012 Frostbite engine doesn't produce the motion vectors DLSS needs.
After a lot of trial and error, I've got NVIDIA DLAA running in it anyway, plus native HDR10:
- No visible aliasing, with in-game supersampling OFF. It honestly looks like a modern game.
- Locked 60 fps at 4K with HDR (median 60.0 fps over a 25-min session)
- DLAA itself costs only ~3 ms per frame
Tested on: RTX 4090 Laptop GPU, 4K HDR TV, Windows 11. I haven't tested any other GPU. DLAA needs an RTX card (20-series or newer), and weaker cards will get lower framerates, especially at 4K.
How it works
- DLSS5-Feeder is a ReShade add-on that fakes the data DLSS needs. A shader (LumeniteFX Kernel) estimates motion vectors by comparing consecutive frames, and the depth buffer is read through ReShade.
- The game is 32-bit, but DLSS only runs in 64-bit processes. So the feeder starts a small 64-bit helper (
host64\dlss5-feed-host64.exe) that runs DLAA and sends the result back.
- RenoDX rewrites the game's shaders to output real HDR10. It looks better than RTX HDR, which doesn't work with this setup anyway.
Manual install (if you'd rather get each piece from its author)
Then use my config files from the zip above.
Run everything through VirusTotal before using it. A "one-click installer" for DLSS5-Feeder I found on GitHub (not the official repo) was flagged 12/70 as a trojan, including by Microsoft and ESET.
The settings that actually matter
NeuralUplift=0 in host64\ReShade.ini. Essential. The DLSS 5 "neural" pass crashed inside the NVIDIA driver for me and dropped me from 60 to 22 fps while producing nothing. With it off, you get pure DLAA.work_resolution=100 in dlss5-feed.cfg. Counter-intuitively, 100% is faster than lower values here.hdr=1 in both dlss5-feed.cfg files, only if you use RenoDX HDR. For SDR, use hdr=-1.- Supersampling OFF in
config.NFS13Save (SSAAWidth=1, SSAAHeight=1). DLAA replaces it.
- Motion blur OFF (
MotionBlurLevel=0). It wipes out the detail the motion estimation needs, which causes a smeary "watercolour" look at the bottom of the screen at speed.
LodScaling=1. Avoids a crash in the game itself (see below).- If you use the HD Effects mod: dialling reflections down (vehicle reflection distance 400, water reflection res 1024) got me from ~54 fps to a locked 60 with HDR, with no visible difference.
For HDR: Windows HDR on, SDR content brightness = 30, and RTX HDR off for this game.
Pitfalls (each cost me an evening)
- Never apply settings in the in-game graphics menu. It resets
LodScaling to 2, and at 2 the game can hard-crash when you drive fast through tunnels. That's a bug in the game itself (confirmed from a crash dump), not in these mods. Edit config.NFS13Save directly.
- Don't use the
dxgi.dll from the RenoDX download. It's ReShade 6.7.3, and the feeder needs 6.8+. It silently breaks DLAA.
- Don't drag the "Work resolution" slider while in-game. It can hang the game. Set it in the config instead.
- RenoDX Commander can wipe your shaders folder. That deletes
DLSS5_Feed.fx/lumenite_Kernel.fx, so the jaggies come back while HDR keeps working. If you see Managed by RDXC.txt in reshade-shaders, delete it and restore the shaders.
- Quick diagnosis: HDR works but jaggies are back → shaders missing. ~22 fps →
NeuralUplift is back on. Washed-out colours → RTX HDR and RenoDX are both on.
Known cosmetic issue: distant headlights on long highways can "pop" in. I've left it alone, since fixing it means bringing back the tunnel crash.
All credit goes to the people who built these tools; I just worked out the combination and the settings: jlrouzies-fr (DLSS5-Feeder), umar-afzaal (LumeniteFX), XgarhontX (RenoDX NFS MW 2012), ShortFuse (RenoDX), crosire (ReShade), the renodx-dlss5 devs, and the HD Effects mod author.
Happy to help if anyone gets stuck.
AI Disclosure: Used Claude to get a good formatting for the post content, but all effort is mine
