NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs don’t just rely on brute force to deliver high-performance visuals. The company have sleepless Deep Learning Super Sampling 3 (also known as DLSS 3), a new version of its AI-based rendering accelerator. Instead of generating ‘just’ pixels, the third generation technology can create completely new frames independently. It’s a bit like the frame interpolation you see (and sometimes despise) with TVs, though this is clearly more sophisticated: NVIDIA is improving performance, not just smoothing video.
The technique is based on both fourth-generation Tensor Cores and an “Optical Flow Accelerator” that predicts motion in a scene by comparing two high-resolution frames and generating intermediate frames. Because it does not involve a computer’s main processor, the approach is particularly useful for Microsoft Flight Simulator and other games that are usually CPU limited. A new detail setting in cyberpunk 2077 it runs at 62FPS at 4K resolution using DLSS2 in NVIDIA tests, but exceeds 100FPS with DLSS 3.
Approximately 35 applications and games will offer DLSS 3 support from the start. This includes PortalRTXolder titles like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and releases based on Unreal Engine 4 and 5.
It’s too early to tell how well DLSS 3 works in practice. NVIDIA is choosing games that take full advantage of DLSS, and the technology may not help as much with less restricted titles. Nonetheless, this could be useful to ensure that more of your games are consistently smooth. Provided, of course, that you’re willing to spend the $899-plus that GPU makers are currently asking for RTX 40-based video cards.
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