The arrival of video cards from NVIDIA's RTX range marked the entry into the consumer market of one of the graphics technologies most awaited by gamers. In fact, thanks to the implementation of the RT Cores, alongside the more classic CUDA, the Californian company has cleared the use of the Ray Tracing in the PC field, effectively opening the way to a new era of graphics. This particular "next-gen" rendering technique has entailed, and still involves, a substantial cost in terms of performance, so much so that with less performing video cards, the use of Ray Tracing often requires compromises from end users.
To overcome this problem, NVIDIA engineers developed DLSS, a deep learning based super sampling technology that improves performance by lowering the internal pixel count from a lower resolution, using a combination of real-time reconstruction and artificial intelligence. to deliver a higher resolution final image.
For this purpose, the Tensor Cores are dedicated, calculation units specially developed to support the work of the DLSS. The award-winning action of 2019 Control was among the first to use this technology intensively. Now Game Ready Drivers 445.75 have brought the DLSS 2.0 as a dowry, an enhanced version that in the title of Remedy sees its best application, with often surprising results.
Power is nothing without "Control"
Control it was one of the first titles to use Ray Tracing in a divine way and even more the DLSS, in its first implementation, with decent results. However, initially this technology did not take advantage of the Tensor Cores, the main machine learning component of the NVIDIA Turing architecture, completely based on the CUDA Core standard and despite providing a significant increase in overall performance. The problem was anything but perfect graphic quality. The revision of DLSS 2.0 brings a clear and profound improvement. Generally, in version 2.0 the DLSS offers three default settings, performance, balanced and quality that resample 50%, 58% and 67% of the native resolution. However, it is currently not possible to select a specific item in Control while other titles, such as Wolfenstein: Youngblood, already allow a more complete control.
Focusing on the title of Remedy, compared to the previous implementation the temporal ghosting is massively reduced and the breakdown of details and textures is significantly decreased, so much so that with DLSS 2.0 at a resolution of 1080p you can get better results than the first version with resolution at 1440p .
Even, in certain situations, on the internal surfaces the textures seem to offer more details than the version with native resolution (and therefore with DLSS 2.0 disabled). The second notable effect consists in the treatment of the edges, which in the first version could be blurred, while now they are rendered with a higher degree of sharpness, even excessive at times.
In general, therefore, the final resampling effect of the image results qualitatively on par with the native resolution version, so much so that the only real way to see if DLSS 2.0 is activated or not is to check the performance in terms of frame rate. And it is precisely in performance that the "miracle" of DLSS 2.0 takes place.
The miracle is in the numbers
We ran our tests on a PC equipped with a cpu Ryzen 7 2700X, Video Card Asus ROG Strix GeForce RTX 2060 with 6 GB of dedicated memory e 16 GB of DDR4 RAM at 3200 MHz. In short, a medium-performance PC, with just over a year of life on its shoulders and able to get away, in most cases, at maximum settings in 1080p.
The speech, however, changes if the fateful Ray Tracing is activated, especially if well implemented as in Control, which offers an almost total global lighting system: with Full HD resolution and setting graphic details and Ray Tracing to the maximum, Control marks the average of 30 FPS, touching peaks of 40 FPS in static moments and inevitably dropping around 20 FPS in excited scenes, making the experience in fact not very enjoyable.
DLSS On
DLSS OFF
Precisely in this situation, NVIDIA's DLSS 2.0 performs its "miracle": activating it in the graphics settings with native resolution at 1080p and rendering resolution at 540p, the average FPS rise to 60 and remain incredibly stable in any situation, even granting 70 FPS in some situations. The game of Remedy at this level shows itself in all its grandeur, improving playability and visual experience.
In conclusion, NVIDIA's DLSS 2.0 takes a decisive step forward in the application of deep learning and AI systems for daily use, allowing the use of features such as Ray Tracing even to those users who are unable to spend a thousand euros for a video card. DLSS 2.0 plays a central role in the entry-level market segment.
The next challenge of the GPU giant looks at 2K resolution: already now with native resolution at 1440p and rendering at 720p on RTX 2060, encouraging results are obtained, which float between 50 and 40 FPS. We are sure that the next versions of the DLSS will allow to reach this goal too. It goes without saying that with these assumptions, with the next generations of GPUs, the much desired 4K 60 FPS will actually become a standard, always the DLSS 2.0 is adequately supported by the developers.
