Nvidia’s Ray Reconstruction aims to do for ray tracing what DLSS did for anti-aliasing

rockpapershotgun.com:

As with Half-Life 2 RTX, Nvidia have taken to Gamescom to make a heap of DLSS announcements. Chief among these is an upcoming new version, DLSS 3.5, which will add to DLSS 3’s existing toolkit of upscaling and AI frame generation with a new trick named Ray Reconstruction. And it sounds pretty clever, if currently limited in application.

Basically, Ray Reconstruction promises to enhance how ray-traced lighting and reflection effects look, while also reducing their typically steep performance cost. A little like how OG DLSS sought to upgrade the effectiveness and performance of anti-aliasing, one might say. If it works, games that support DLSS 3.5 – Cyberpunk 2077 and its Phantom Liberty expansion have already signed up – could start coming with a simple toggle that makes them look nicer and run better. Sounds good, so long as you also have a GeForce RTX graphics card with enough muscle to handle ray tracing in the first place.

To explain the technical details in a way that hopefully won’t send anyone to sleep, I’m going to acquiesce to Alice Bee’s requests that I use more 'cowboys and beans' metaphors à la the RPS Electronic Wireless Show. Rendering games with ray tracing creates a lot of visual noise, this being discoloured pixels and other nasty distortions that could spoil the image – picture this as a cowboy getting indigestion from eating some otherwise delicious beans. Denoisers, collections of algorithms designed to smooth out and hide noise are therefore deployed, like the beans manufacturers spiking their sauce with a cowboy tummy-soothing antacid.

However, because the denoising process can kill off some colour data and finer details, Ray Reconstruction aims to replace existing denoisers by examining data