Unity, native support for Nvidia DLSS within the year: good news for those with a GeForce RTX

Unity, one of the most popular game engines in the world, will integrate natively the DLSS support (Deep Learning Super Sampling) of Nvidia. After support for real-time ray tracing in 2019, the arrival of DLSS in Unity marks a new shot by Nvidia towards a more widespread diffusion in video games of the technologies at the heart of the cards. GeForce RTX.

Before the end of the year, DLSS will be natively supported for the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) of Unity 2021.2. Simultaneously with the announcement, Nvidia released a video in which Mathieu Muller of Unity, senior product manager for high-end graphics, illustrates the novelty and the benefits it brings.

The DLSS uses artificial intelligence to produce an image with a quality comparable to the native resolution (sometimes even better) and at the same time perform the conventional rendering of a fraction of the pixels. With real-time ray tracing and DLSS, Unity developers can create visually better content played by Nvidia’s GeForce RTX video cards with higher frame rates at high resolutions.

Although ray tracing produces more realistic images than classic rasterization, it also requires a lot more computation, which leads to a drop in the frame rate. Nvidia built a supercomputer to train a deep neural network behind DLSS with very high quality 16K offline rendered images of many types of content. Once trained, the model can be integrated into the main DLSS library, into the game itself, or even downloaded from Nvidia’s Game Ready driver.

At that point the Tensor Core units present in the RTX 2000 and 3000 GPUs come into play and take on the task of intelligently scaling up to a higher resolution and, in doing so, significantly increase frame rates thanks to the lower impact on CUDAs. core and obviously the less work that needs to be done, as it is “already digested” by the supercomputer.

DLSS is not only available for Unity, for a few weeks there has also been a free plugin in the marketplace of the most used graphics engine in the world, the Unreal Engine.