7 ways Nvidia’s DLSS 4 is making the future of gaming happen today

Nvidia’s DLSS 4 is here, promising better AI-powered upscaling, ray reconstruction, and even more AI-generated frames. It still has some controversial edges, but that’s been true for the technology since the first version came out in 2018. The quality of the features shows that it’s here to stay. What’s more, as when it first came out, the latest version of DLSS won’t fully have an impact until some point in the future, as game developers get to grips with optimizing for the tech. Until that point, we can still get a view of what the future of gaming holds for the best GPUs, at least from Nvidia’s perspective.

7

Raster performance won’t improve forever

We need other visual processing pipelines to keep up with the demands of games

Ever since computer graphics went 3D, raster performance became the target to hit when making new graphics cards. And for the longest time, that was fine, as it was the only pipeline for graphics rendering; every game and app relied on it, and there were meaningful improvements every GPU generation. Except, the rate of improvement has slowed, the generational leaps aren’t there anymore, and whatever you might want to happen, the only way to increase raster performance in a meaningful way right now is by increasing transistor counts on more advanced foundry nodes, leading to more expensive graphics cards.

The way to get around this is by using AI-powered upscaling, like DLSS 4. Essentially, you render the raster image as before, but at a lower resolution, then use the upscaling to give a higher-resolution frame, around the same time it takes to render a normal frame. It’s a second graphical pipeline to give higher fidelity images while using lower overall resources, boosting raster performance by upscaling the original image. Whatever your misgivings are about upscaling, DLSS 4 shows how well the technology can work, and it’s not going away.

6

The visual quality is there

It’s harder and harder to tell if it’s on or not

I’ve been playing with DLSS 4 for the last couple of weeks, and while I’m doing it on a GeForce RTX 4080 Super, so no 4x frame generation, the visual quality is astonishing. I’ve been switching back and forth between pure raster and DLSS at the same resolution in the handful of supported titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and God of War Ragnarök, and I genuinely can’t tell if I’m using it or not.

That’s the same whether I’m using DLAA, Performance, or Quality settings for DLSS or if I have 2x frame gen enabled. The smeary shadows are gone, the text is crisp and readable, and the graphical artifacts, like smeared trails when in motion, aren’t any different from those in the raster images. I used to hate DLSS when it first came out because it made things like fog effects blocky, but that’s gone, too. The image quality is absolutely there, and it’s essentially free performance at 4K resolution.

5

It’s designed for 4K 240Hz displays

But it promises much higher resolutions in the future

One of DLSS 4’s big performance enhancers is multi-frame generation. This process takes a rasterized frame and creates three more frames, improving the frame rate by fourfold. This isn’t necessary for lower resolution gamers, who already get high frame rates even with ray tracing turned on, but in intensive path traced games at 4K resolution, this could be the difference between a stuttery mess and a high frame rate.

It also shows what the future holds for resolutions higher than 4K, as the raster performance of even the most powerful flagships isn’t enough to drive smooth frame rates at 8K or higher. The future of gaming at high resolutions makes AI upscaling a necessity, and until another rendering method comes out, it will be a staple.

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4

It doesn’t need to be coded in

The Nvidia app can swap the DLL in for you

While DLSS does need to be enabled in the game engine, the level of DLSS can be changed by swapping in the latest DLL file. DLSS 4 and its frame generation can be enabled by using an override setting in the Nvidia app, which adds the relevant DLL to the game when it’s loaded into memory. Remember, DLSS, at its heart, is a post-processing technique, and that means it can be added like other post-processing shaders like ReShade and ENBSeries. This means even older games that might not get an update can use DLSS 4 features, assuming you have the compatible hardware in your PC.

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3

The transformer model has promise

It’s already as good quality and will only get better

Until now, DLSS has used one model for AI upscaling: CNN. With DLSS 4, a new transformer-based model was released, and users can switch between the two at any time. The biggest impact is in image quality, with the transformer model retaining more fine detail, like chain link fences, power cables, and text. Currently, it comes at a small hit to performance, but this is just the first iteration of the model. Nvidia will keep refining it, and the future looks even more promising. The other thing is that, unlike multi frame gen, the transformer model runs on older RTX cards, giving every existing user a boost to their graphical quality.

2

Enables higher resolution VR games

VR needs a ton of graphical power to give smooth frame rates

One thing that isn’t discussed enough is the promise of DLSS in virtual reality gaming. It’s hard enough to achieve high frame rates in some games on one monitor, but for VR, you need to achieve a minimum of 90 FPS on two monitors. While techniques like foveated rendering help render only the immediate center of your field of view at a higher resolution, DLSS 4 can help render the entire screen while maintaining graphical fidelity.

And with the new transformer model making fine detail better, it means even the inside of cockpits in VR flight sims can be crystal clear. Nvidia has also mentioned ways game developers could tell DLSS to leave some features at native resolution for elements like text or tiny gauge readouts, keeping those at native raster resolution while still giving the benefit of AI upscaling to the rest of the screen.

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1

Higher frame rates for lower-powered GPUs

Those with low and mid-range cards can still get plenty of visual power

Even if you don’t play at 4K or with the flagship GPUs, DLSS 4 offers plenty of benefits. The existing 2x frame generation for RTX 40 series cards is getting an upgrade that uses less VRAM and fewer resources to run, giving that extra frame less overhead. The new transformer model for DLSS is coming to every RTX card, meaning better visual quality all the way back to the RTX 20 series. And upscaling already benefits those non-flagship cards, but now it uses a smaller amount of resources to do so. The benefits might help 1440p gamers more, but any performance increase is welcome.

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DLSS is here for the long haul

Nvidia is all-in on both ray tracing and DLSS, and the next generation of graphics cards will build on that further. I have to wonder when, not if, we get to a point where most of the performance of the graphics pipeline will be coming from the AI cores, with a relatively small number of normal cores feeding the initial rasterized frames. That day is probably not that far ahead, and AI neural rendering is the next thing Nvidia is working on to enable it. Until then, DLSS 4 gives a huge performance boost without sacrificing visual quality.

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