Nvidia’s DLSS 3 Tech Used In RTX 4000 GPUs Promises To Offer 50% Better Frame Rates Compared To DLSS 2.0

Last Updated on September 21, 2022 by Anu Joy

Alongside the GeForce RTX 4000 series GPUs, NVIDIA also unveiled the next-generation upscaling technology called DLSS 3, or Deep Learning Super Sampling 3. It’s an AI-powered performance multiplier that weaves in neural rendering for games and apps, delivering 4x the performance of brute-force rendering.

DLSS 3 Comes To 35 Games, More To Be Added Soon

The DLSS 3 technology is coming to popular game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine. During the launch event, Nvidia said that 35 games and applications have already announced their support, with more to be added soon. The company added that since DLSS 3 is built on top of DLSS 2 integrations, game developers can quickly enable it in existing titles that already support DLSS 2. 

Some of the games with DLSS 3 support include—A Plague Tale: Requiem, Cyberpunk 2077, HITMAN 3, Hogwarts Legacy, Microsoft Flight Simulator, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Naraka Bladepoint, NVIDIA Omniverse, S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2: Heart of Chernobyl, Atomic Heart, and more. 

How Does DLSS 3.0 Work?  

The technology debuted in the new Ada Lovelace-powered RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 GPUs and is powered by fourth-generation Tensor Cores and a new Optical Flow Accelerator. The latter generates entirely new frames, instead of just pixels, by analysing two sequential in-game images and predicting and inserting additional frames. Compared to DLSS 2.0, Nvidia claimed a 50% improvement in frame rates using DLSS 3.

Nvidia claims this dramatically reduces visual anomalies in AI rendering, especially in particles, reflections, shadows and lighting. These AI-generated frames are then fed into a convoluted neural network to automatically generate additional frames for each game-rendered frame, a first for real-time game rendering. 

Nvidia claims DLSS 3 can boost frame rates even when the game is bottlenecked by the CPU. For physics-heavy games where CPU usage is limited, DLSS 3 helps the RTX 40 series GPU to render games at up to twice the frame rate than the CPU is able to compute in the game. Nvidia showcased a new detail setting in Cyberpunk 2077 where the game was able to deliver 100 FPS with 4K resolution using DLSS 3. 

It’s too soon to say how the DLSS technology works in practice. It will, however, require you to install one of the latest NVIDIA RTX 4000 series GPUs to enjoy the performance bump.