Witchfire’s Performance Doesn’t Really Improve Much with DLSS 3, and the Hitches Are Still There
Polish indie studio The Astronauts launched Witchfire in early access last week via the Epic Games Store. It's the developer's second game following The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, and it's a completely different genre (rogue-lite dark fantasy first-person shooter) compared to that game.
In January 2023, the studio confirmed NVIDIA DLSS 3 support, stating that it was a no-brainer addition to Witchfire since it allowed the seemingly impossible in terms of frame rate and visual quality.
In my pre-launch interview with founder and CEO Adrian Chmielarz, he said of NVIDIA's technology:
With only 67% of sharpness, let’s call it that, the image upscaled to 100% is maybe 1% worse than if it was directly rendered to 100%. It sounds weird, it sounds impossible, but that’s the truth. And the framerate boost is phenomenal. So, for the low price of 1% of image degradation, which is basically nothing, you get a much better experience. I love it.
Today, NVIDIA has posted a DLSS comparison trailer that shows the game running at over 200FPS with DLSS 3, touting a 2.x3 performance boost over DLSS OFF.
However, you have to keep in mind that NVIDIA always tests 4K games in Performance mode (upscaling from 1080p). Secondly, the comparison is always DLSS off to DLSS 2 (Super Resolution) + 3 (Frame Generation) on.
In Witchfire, though, DLSS Frame Generation is barely an improvement, at least in my testing with a Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU, RTX 4090 GPU, and 32GB of DDR5 RAM. Graphics settings were all set to Ultra, with DLSS Super Resolution in Quality mode (upscaling from 1440p).
As you can see in the capture below, the average frame rate only went up by 16 frames per second, a mere 8.2% boost. The 1% percentile FPS fared comparatively better - DLSS 3
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