NVIDIA announces DLSS 3 with up to four times the performance
NVIDIA’s magical DLSS technology becomes even more powerful.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
What you need to know
NVIDIA today announced the third generation of its Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology alongside the newGeForce RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 GPUs. The company boasts this launch “kicks off a new era of NVIDIA RTX neural rendering for games and applications.” Building on the already established AI-accelerated super-resolution techniques, NVIDIA is able to deliver up to four times the performance of brute-force rendering.
DLSS is a technology developed by NVIDIA to ensure features like real-time ray tracing are possible for games without hampering performance too heavily. The original RTX 20 series of cards launched withray-tracing and DLSSsupport in their infancy and we saw substantial performance gains with the RTX 30 series. With the latest ray tracing and DLSS updates applied and cores used with Ada Lovelace cards, gamers can expect some promising results.
Coupled with the new DLSS tech, NVIDIA is making use of 4th Gen Tensor Cores and a new optical flow accelerator on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series cards. Then there’s the optical multi-frame generation that generates entirely new frames, rather than just pixels. The Ada Lovelace architecture in RTX 40 series cards is capable of analyzing two sequential in-game images to calculate motion vector data for objects and elements.
This results in fewer visual anomalies when the AI renders elements like particles, reflections, lighting, and shadows. Pairs of super-resolution frames are then fed into a convolutional neural network that analyzes the data and generations an additional frame for each game-rendered frame. NVIDIA notes this as a first for real-time in-game rendering. The end result is up to four times the performance compared to DLSS disabled.
And because all of this happens post-process, the RTX 40 series GPUs can boost frame rates even when the processor is a bottleneck. This in turn allows the game to be rendered at up to twice the frame rate that the CPU is able to compute, particularly useful in CPU-intensive games. Finally, we’ve got NVIDIA Reflex, which handles the synchronization of thebest graphics cardand CPU to lessen any system latency.
More than 35 games and applications have already announced support for DLSS 3, including:
NVIDIA will be launching DLSS 3 alongside its new GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards. The first of which, the GeForce RTX 4090, will launch on October 12, 2022. If you’re coming from an AMD GPU, check out our guide onAMD FidelityFX Super Resolution vs. DLSSfor more details on how they compare.
Get the Windows Central Newsletter
All the latest news, reviews, and guides for Windows and Xbox diehards.
Rich Edmonds was formerly a Senior Editor of PC hardware at Windows Central, covering everything related to PC components and NAS. He’s been involved in technology for more than a decade and knows a thing or two about the magic inside a PC chassis. You can follow him on Twitter at@RichEdmonds.
