It’s felt like DLSS has been in the process of becoming an irreplaceable tentpole feature of graphical video game presentation for a while now. As more games adopt the feature and its similar equivalents from other companies, it becomes ever harder to justify turning it off – and with some tasty demos for its latest iteration, Nvidia appears to be truly upping the ante.
DLSS stands for Deep Learning Super Sampling, and it’s a clever AI-assisted feature that essentially allows you to get higher frame rates in games without having to sacrifice their visual fidelity. A game that might only run at 30 frames per second in regular settings could previously often be cranked up to over 60fps with DLSS enabled – and with DLSS 3.0, Nvidia aims to crank the gains up even further.
The way DLSS works is pretty simple. AI models are trained on the visuals of games, meaning that the AI can effectively upscale a game with such accuracy in its fidelity that it’s near-enough indistinguishable from the game natively running at a much higher resolution. Running at a lower initial resolution is helpful for settings, however, allowing you to crank up all those delicious PC gaming graphics toggles to max – including ray tracing, the transformative lighting feature that also has a habit of tanking frame rates.