If you’re a frequent gamer, by now you’ll have heard of ray tracing and NVIDIA’s DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), two powerful tools that combine to boost performance in games and provide stunning visual fidelity by replicating realistic lighting and reflections. NVIDIA pioneered these technologies in gaming with the introduction of its RTX 20-Series graphics cards, and in the two hardware generations since then, the techniques and AI hardware behind them have improved considerably. With DLSS 3.5 and a new Ray Reconstruction system working hand-in-hand, ray-traced games can look all the more lifelike and run significantly smoother at the same time. So how do these technologies work?
DLSS has been an evolving technology. At its start, its focus was on rendering games at lower, easier-to-process resolution and then increasing the output resolution by filling in the gaps between pixels , giving gamers the benefit of sharper visuals with increased frame rates in lower resolution. NVIDIA managed this by training its AI model on high-quality game visuals so that it could understand what they should look like and know how to fill in the gaps when stretching a game’s lower resolution frames to higher resolutions. This process could also flipped somewhat with DLAA (Deep Learning Anti-aliasing), which can render at a display’s native resolution but use the same AI logic to figure out what an even higher-resolution frame would look like and then down-sample that to output an effectively anti-aliased image.
