Alongside the new RTX 40 series GPUs, Nvidia also announced the third generation of its Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology, which can deliver up to four times the performance compared to rendering at native resolution. Nvidia introduced DLSS with its RTX 20 series cards four years ago, and it’s now available in over 200 games and apps. It improves performance by allowing frames to be rendered internally at a lower resolution and upscaling them using dedicated AI accelerators inside RTX GPUs, called Tensor cores.
Nvidia improves upon this with DLSS 3 by adding Optical Multi Frame Generation to generate entirely new frames rather than just pixels, similar to motion interpolation found on TVs (although hopefully without the input lag penalty). In performance mode, DLSS 3 is reconstructing seven-eighths of the total displayed pixels. Super Resolution rebuilds three-fourths of the first frame (e.g. 1080p to 4K), with Frame Generation reconstructing the entire second frame.
Since Optical Multi Frame Generation executes as a post-process on the GPU, it can increase framerates even in CPU-limited games, such as Microsoft Flight Simulator. Unfortunately, DLSS Frame Generation is powered by the new fourth-generation Tensor cores and Optical Flow Accelerator of the Nvidia Ada Lovelace architecture, meaning it only works on RTX 40 GPUs. Lastly, DLSS 3 also integrates Nvidia Reflex technology, which synchronizes the GPU and CPU, eliminating the render queue and thus improving responsiveness and input lag.
Over 35 games and applications have announced support for the new version of DLSS, including Cyberpunk 2077, Hitman 3, and Stalker 2. Justice, NetEase’s martial arts MMO, will be the first game to receive support for DLSS 3 through an update launching on October 12. A Plague Tale: Requiem will be the first game with the new technology at launch when it comes out on October 18. Owners of RTX 20 and 30 series GPUs will still have access to DLSS 2.0 and Nvidia Reflex in DLSS 3-enabled games.
