Apex Compute has released the frame-generation component of Apex Neural Rendering, or ANR, in beta. The project lists Steam Deck and Linux through Proton among its supported platforms, alongside Windows and Apple silicon. For handheld players, the appeal is an alternative that is not tied to one GPU vendor’s newest hardware.
There is an important distinction between the announcement and what is ready to download. ANR FG, the frame-generation tool, is in beta now. ANR SR, its super-resolution upscaler, and ANR RR, its ray-reconstruction component, are listed as coming to beta later. This is not a complete replacement for every part of NVIDIA’s DLSS suite today.
The supported-hardware list includes NVIDIA RTX 20-series cards and newer, GTX 16-series cards, AMD Radeon RX 5000-series cards and newer, Intel Arc A- and B-series GPUs, and Apple M1 or later chips, with the Steam Deck explicitly named. The stated operating systems are Windows 10 and 11, Linux and SteamOS with Proton, and macOS 26 or later.
Apex’s comparison page makes ambitious claims about image quality, processing time and memory use against DLSS Frame Generation. Those results come from the developer, including tests on an RTX 5090. They are not independent Steam Deck benchmarks, and they do not tell us how every game will look or feel on a handheld. We have not tested the beta ourselves.
The project’s GitHub page is also worth reading carefully before calling ANR open source. It says the ANR source code is coming soon. OptiScaler, bundled with releases, is GPL-licensed and has its source attached, but that does not make the ANR component open source by association.
The latest checked build, FG-V.B14, was published on November 12. After tools such as GameNative brought more upscaling and frame-generation options to Android, ANR is another project worth watching. Its handheld value still needs real-world testing.
Source: Apex Compute
