Nvidia Unveils DLSS 2.0 – Worth It This Time?

pczone.co.uk:

With the debut of the Nvidia RTX line of GPUs came new technologies, most notably real time ray tracing support – a feature that caught rival AMD and gamers completely by surpise as the ‘holy grail’ of games graphics was thought beyond the capabilities of a consumer level card. Oh ye of little faith!

These RTX GPUs took online gaming to a whole new level. Developers now had the opportunity to make game graphics as realistic as possible. It goes even for mere online best slots games. Now, these games can be made as lifelike as sitting in front of a physical slot machine, the themes can be intriguing and immersive.

Fast forward a couple of years and AMD is now on board with their upcoming RDNA 2 architecture, which is powering the next-gen Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5.

One intriguing feature of RTX that didn’t receive so much fan fare however was what Nvidia like to call DLSS – Deep Learning Super Sampling. A fancy way of describing upscaling, basically.

The idea is that you can render a game at a much lower resolution than your display will natively support to get better performance, while the clever AI upscales the image using it’s fancy deep-learning algorithms to make the picture as crisp and clean as it would be had you had turned your resolution to the max.

Sounds good, yeah? Well the thing is DLSS has largely been eclipsed so far by another, far more rudementary solution – a sharpening filter.

Nvidias latest sharpening technique seems to work just as well as DLSS, without the need for a game to officially support it. Or for the consumer to own an expensive RTX card with tensor cores to power it. Wow, embarassing.

Nvidia seem aware of this though, as quite out of the blue they have rolled out what they’re calling DLSS