Here’s why we shouldn’t get carried away with Nvidia’s DLSS 3 frame rate booster

techradar.com:

Nvidia’s big RTX 4000 graphics card reveal on September 20 also incorporated a fresh take on its frame rate boosting technology, with boasts that it can speed up things massively – although further examination of the details Team Green spilled on DLSS 3 produces some noteworthy caveats.

If you recall, Nvidia claimed that DLSS 3 is capable of boosting frame rates by up to four times, meaning the upscaled game is up to quadruple the speed of native resolution – no mean feat to say the least.

That came with proof of DLSS 3 in Cyberpunk 2077 witnessing a jump from 22 frames per second (fps) at native resolution (4K) to 85 fps with DLSS 3 and the new Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode for the game (that’s being introduced in the near future). Alongside that, Portal with RTX showed over a 550% increase.

This was on a rig with an RTX 4090 graphics card, Intel Core i9-12900K processor, plus 32GB RAM, by the way.

However, those huge fourfold or fivefold boosts look like the exception rather than the rule, as you might imagine – the picture is very different with a bunch of contemporary games that have benchmarks provided by Nvidia.

F1 2022 is shown with a 2.5x gain (with ray tracing on) thanks to DLSS 3, and Microsoft Flight Simulator saw its frame rate doubled (from 50 fps to 100 fps). Warhammer 40,000: Darktide also witnessed a doubling in frame rate (just over, actually).

In a further graph PC Gamer(opens in new tab) flagged up, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla achieved a more modest 1.5x increase, and both The Division 2 plus Resident Evil Village showed around a 1.7x boost (with an RTX 4090, this is).

Bear in mind the other main caveats with DLSS 3, namely that it’s for RTX 4000 graphics cards only (the RTX 4090 and two spins on the RTX 4080 to