Nvidia's imminent DLSS 3.5 update will improve ray tracing and performance across all RTX GPUs

pcgamer.com:

Nvidia has announced a gorgeous new update to its Deep Learning Super Sampling technology. DLSS 3.5 will drop in the next few months and promises to improve both the look of a final ray traced scene as well as deliver a welcome little performance bump, too. And how is it doing this? Why, AI, of course.

The addition of Ray Reconstruction to the DLSS 3.5 pipeline isn't going to be a ring-fenced technology—as Frame Generation is for the RTX 40-series cards—it's going to be available to anyone using an RTX generation GPU. Though, notably DLSS itself is still platform specific, so it's obviously still an Nvidia-only performance and fidelity boon.

Effectively what it's doing is replacing the denoisers in the graphics pipeline with this AI-powered Ray Reconstruction element that will work alongside the traditional Super Resolution upscaling workflow. 

It's this removal of the standard denoisers which is delivering the slight performance increase, but the improval in overall image fidelity which is the most stark difference between the current method and DLSS 3.5.

While ray tracing tracks a huge number of rays firing all over a game scene in real-time, there's no possible way right now that we have the GPU power to be able to have a 1:1 ratio of rays to pixels. That's where the denoisers come in, taking all those little dots of light, those individual rays, and blends lighting information between them to fill a scene so it doesn't look so damned noisy. 

But they're pretty dumb, and use heuristics to make the decisions on how to smudge the dots, and while the parameters are hand-tuned they can easily lose a whole lot of information and deliver a comparatively blurred final result.

It looks better than a noisy scene, especially