NVIDIA DLSS 3.5 Unveiled: Faster & Better Raytracing Enhanced By AI, Supports All RTX GPUs, Coming To Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2 & Portal RTX This Fall

wccftech.com:

NVIDIA has announced DLSS 3.5, the next major update to the upscaling technology which now accelerates ray tracing and makes it look way better with AI.

Today marks 5 years since DLSS was originally introduced at Gamescom 2018. Ever since the tech has become a fundamental component of NVIDIA's RTX GPUs and has seen incremental updates that have made the technology better thanks to the AI supercomputers at NVIDIA who are always hard at work at training the model. Following DLSS 1, the company introduced four major updates which are listed below:

This year at Gamescom 2023, NVIDIA is taking the wraps off its second major DLSS 3 update known as DLSS 3.5. With DLSS 3.5, NVIDIA is specifically enhancing ray tracing with the same AI model that helps train DLSS. But to understand what DLSS 3.5 does, we have to look at how ray tracing works traditionally.

A typical ray tracing lighting pipeline first generates the scene with materials and geometry. At this point, no lighting effects are applied. This image is then sampled with various lighting effects such as reflections and global illumination.

In the example image below, you can see that the scene isn't fully covered, leaving black pixels which are gaps in lighting information, and these empty spaces are left there because you can't shoot enough rays to fill in every pixel or when they bounce back, they aren't evenly distributed. So the result is that there's always going to be missing pixels despite how many rays are shot at the scene.

This is where denoisers come in which analyze these sampled rays and fill in the missing pixels using spatial and temporal techniques. A game engine can include multiple denoisers for each lightning effect. After the denoisers have finished their