Enthusiasts have managed to get Nvidia DLSS 5 running on Apple Silicon hardware for the first time. The community workaround brings advanced neural reconstruction and lighting effects to Mac computers through custom translation layers. But massive performance penalties currently make games completely unplayable.
Following earlier community experiments running DLSS 5 on AMD Radeon graphics cards, modders turned their attention to Apple computers. Independent developer iamwavecut adapted the DLSS 5 library to run directly through the Apple Metal graphics API. Another developer known as Mappsnet7 then connected that Metal backend to Windows games using ReShade and the Game Porting Toolkit 4.0b2 environment. Together, these tools allowed the neural model to execute on Mac hardware.
Tested DLSS 5 on Apple Silicon via DLSSMac
by u/AnyPomelo3352 in macgaming
Early testing shows clear visual improvements to surface lighting, contact shadows, and overall scene depth. The framerate hit, however, is brutal. Running on a MacBook Pro equipped with an M5 Pro chip and a 16 core GPU, the test machine delivered just 2.32 fps at 1440p resolution. Input latency spiked to 240 ms, turning games into slideshows.
The primary bottleneck comes down to silicon architecture. Nvidia designed DLSS 5 around FP8 precision calculations, but Apple M5 Pro lacks dedicated FP8 compute hardware. This forces the system to run those neural workloads using FP16 instructions instead, which doubles the mathematical workload. Layering ReShade on top of the Game Porting Toolkit translation layer adds even more computational overhead. While the project proves that modern AI upscaling can run across competing hardware platforms, playable framerates will require native silicon support.
