Nvidia’s Deep Learning Dynamic Super Resolution tech is out now – here’s how to enable it

rockpapershotgun.com:

Earlier this week, Nvidia quietly announced a kind of DLSS-adjacent downsampling tech: Deep Learning Dynamic Super Resolution (DLDSR). It aims to improve image sharpness and quality on GeForce RTX graphics cards, using AI to reduce the performance loss of Nvidia’s existing DSR feature, and it’s now available to install and enable through GeForce Game Ready Driver 511.23.

This is a beefy driver update in general, adding optimisations for God of War as well as some flashy new filters to enable in GeForce Experience (one of them even has a decent crack at spoofing ray traced lighting effects). But if you own one of the best graphics cards from Nvidia’s RTX range, it’s DLDSR that could make best use of its Tensor cores, by rendering games at a higher resolution before “intelligently” shrinking down each frame to fit your monitor’s native res. The result: better-defined details and smoother edges. In theory.

Standard DSR already does this, of course, but eats an FPS drop in the process. Nvidia's idea is that DLDSR’s Tensor-enabled AI enhancements can drastically reduce the performance hit that downsampling would normally dish out. I’ll be testing DLDSR in-depth next week to see how true this is in different games, though since the driver is already available, go ahead and try it out yourself if you want. (Update - it is now next week, and I have indeed tested DLDSR. It's pretty good!)

Intentionally rendering games at higher-than-native resolution might not make much sense if your PC hardware is already struggling to reach 60fps (or 144fps, or whatever your preference is). Indeed, you could argue DSR is only worth having in games where there’s enough performance headroom to justify the loss in frames per second. DLDSR