Nvidia DLSS analysis: how AI tech can make PC games run 40 per cent faster
What if PC hardware manufacturers fully embraced the kind of smart upscaling technologies now commonplace on consoles? It's a topic I've explored in the past, but with Nvidia's new deep learning super-sampling - DLSS - we have a reconstruction technology with full hardware acceleration, producing some remarkable results. Indeed, based on a Final Fantasy 15 demo we've had access to, DLSS is increasing performance by 40 per cent and in some respects, it's actually improving image quality.
So how does it work? At the Gamescom reveal for RTX technology, Nvidia big boss Jen-Hsun Huang talked about how deep learning technology - bread and butter for the new tensor cores inside Turing - could 'infer' more detail from any given image through learned experience of looking at similar images. Translated to DLSS, Nvidia's internal super-computer - dubbed Saturn 5 - analyses extremely high detail game images, producing an algorithm just a few megabytes in size that is downloaded via a driver update to an RTX card.
The game itself is rendered at a lower resolution and just like those image enhancement techniques that work so well via deep learning techniques, DLSS works to produce higher resolution imagery. We're pretty sure there's a bit more going on here than Nvidia is telling us. For starters, DLSS relies on titles that use temporal anti-aliasing (which, to be fair, covers pretty much every major modern game engine these days). This suggests that DLSS pulls info from prior frames to help with its reconstruction over and above whatever info it 'infers' via its algorithm.
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