Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) is Nvidia’s signature upscaling technology. Previously, DLSS 2 has been used by modern AAA titles to achieve massive performance improvements. This technology improves framerates in several unplayable games. It also gives the hardware to achieve high refresh rate gaming which is rather impossible considering how intensive ray tracing workloads have become.
How is DLSS 3 better than DLSS 2?
Despite being an impressive software, DLSS could not achieve the numbers that a modern game would require to be played smoothly on some high refresh rate panels. Thus, Nvidia knew they had to up their game and introduce a much better upscaling formula.
DLSS 3 is the company’s latest answer to the hardware-demanding ray tracing and rendering workloads of modern games. Team Green has completely revamped its upscaling technology.
DLSS 2 would take a low-resolution output and then use AI to predict a high-resolution version of the same. This would result in significantly more processing time as compared to their latest technology.
With DLSS 3, the company is using optical flow accelerators to scan what is changing in two successive frames. This data is then fed to the neural network which uses it to predict intermediate frames.
Thus, the new version of the upscaling technology can predict frames that were never rendered by the GPU. This is much unlike the previous iterations of this technology which heavily relied on how much the GPU can output at a particular resolution. This results in sharper image quality and a much higher performance boost.
DLSS can also benefit CPU-intensive games as it does not interfere with the rendering pipeline. Nvidia showcased over 100% performance gain in Microsoft Flight Simulator, an extremely CPU-intensive title, with DLSS 3.
In GPU-intensive video games, the performance improvement is a fewfold too. In Cyberpunk 2077, Nvidia showcased a 4x performance improvement. While the game was running at around 22-24 FPS without any form of upscaling, turning DLSS 3 on boosted the performance to over 90 FPS.