NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics card owners who’d like to check out Neon Giant’s new twin-stick cyberpunk action-shooter RPG, The Ascent, may want to opt for the Steam version instead of the one on Microsoft’s popular game subscription service. As pointed out by PC Gamer, the Xbox Game Pass version of The Ascent lacks support for both NVIDIA DLSS and ray tracing. While the latter can seemingly be enabled via the options menu, players are reporting that switching those options on doesn’t actually do anything. Manually adding .dll files to enable NVIDIA DLSS doesn’t seem to work either due to the way Xbox Game Pass titles are packaged. Neon Giant is presumably working with Microsoft on updating The Ascent so it lines up with the Steam version.
After the DLSS .dll files were made available via TechPowerUp you’d hope that maybe it would just be a simple drag and drop into a specific binaries folder. Unfortunately that is simply not how Game Pass games arrive on your PC. They’re packaged up as almost individual entities, and while we could navigate through the folders, we were unable to add in the necessary files, and were simply told there wasn’t enough space to drop them in as if the game itself were a drive.
Sources: PC Gamer, r/pcgaming