NVIDIA Deep Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS) Shown To Press

By Nathan Kirsch

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX-20 series graphics cards were just announced on Monday have some impressive looking new features. Without a doubt the exciting new feature that will change the way we play games is real-time ray tracing. NVIDIA is so excited about being able to launch a graphics card series with this capability that they dropped their ‘GTX’ moniker for the new and trendy ‘RTX’ branding for the cards that are capable of this feature. The GeForce RTX-20 series graphics cards also support Deep Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS), the latest super-sampling method that NVIDIA has come up with. DLSS technology applies deep learning and AI to rendering techniques thanks to the AI tensor cores for crisp, smooth edges on rendered objects in supporting game titles. DLSS will be part of the driver and NVIDIA will use game titles that developers give them for the deep learning / AI processing in NVIDIA’s labs. There will be no fee for developers for this and if a patch comes out that requires changes, NVIDIA will need to re-learn the title and that could take anywhere from a number of days to a week or so. NVIDIA gets game tiles and patches ahead of the public, so they don’t see the AI processing time being an issue. As of right now the only cards that will support DLSS would be the GeForce RTX 2070, RTX 2080, and RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards.

NVIDIA DLSS Demo on GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Versus GeForce GTX 1080 Ti

NVIDIA showed us a demo that had a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti running the Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) method right now to a system with a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. The demo itself was the Unreal Engine 4 Infiltrator tech demo in 4K on NVIDIA G-Sync displays. Right off the bat we noticed that the system with the RTX 2080 Ti card was running the demo smoother, but it was also crisper. The frame rate meter in the upper left had corner had the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti running at 31 FPS and the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti running at 71 FPS in the scene below. That makes the 2080 Ti about 229% faster than the 1080 Ti and with better looking images being rendered. NVIDIA has shown a 50% increase in performance going from a 1080 Pascal based card to a 2080 Turing based card, so it looks like enabling DLSS helps performance and doesn’t hurt it. All of the technical discussion around DLSS is still under embargo, but it looks impressive.

Games that will use NVIDIA DLSS include the following, with more to come:

We are super excited that big name titles like PUBG are on the list for DLSS support. Who knows how many titles will support DLSS on September 20th, 2018 when these cards actually launch, but a good number of developers are adding support and that is a good sign!