What is DLSS 3, the novelty of the new NVIDIA GeForce RTX series graphics cards?

The new series graphics cards NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4000, which includes the new RTX 4080 and RTX 4090, will arrive in a few days. Specifically, the RTX 4090 is already available from October 12, and the two versions of the 4080 will arrive in November.

They are not cheap graphics: RTX 4080 (12GB) starting at €1,099, RTX 4080 (16GB) starting at €1,469 and RTX 4090 (24GB) starting at €1,959.

However, among all the hardware improvements that we can find, One of its biggest new features is DLSS 3, a new revision of NVIDIA’s DLSS scaling technology.

NVIDIA presented DLSS 3 at its GTC 2022 keynote, announcing this technology as the nerve center of your new cards and, according to the company itself, it could end up defining the next generation of NVIDIA much more than the graphics cards themselves.

AMD, for its part and as a great competitor of the brand, has been working hard to get its FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) up to DLSS, and in recent months it has succeeded. Nevertheless, DLSS 3 looks like it’s going to completely change the game (pun intended), and this time, FSR 2.0 may not be able to catch up, at least for now.

What is DLSS 3?

Let’s go, first of all with the core, which is to understand the concept of DLSS. In a nutshell, DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) is a feature of NVIDIA RTX that uses AI to increase the frame rate performance of a game.

DLSS essentially renders images at a lower resolution to help decrease stress on the GPU, thus allowing for increased frame rates. To this, the Artificial intelligence add more pixels to compensateallowing users to increase frame rates and maintain high resolution without overloading the GPU.

well here DLSS 3 uses the same concept as the original version, but has improved the technology, offering up to four times more performance.

In addition, two of the great incorporations have been the 4th Generation Tensor Cores (Microprocessors that speed up all AI-based features, improving image quality and sparing the GPU from heavy rendering loads) and the Optical Flow Accelerator to create what is known as Optical Multi-Frame Generation.

What this new capacity allows is to produce frames completely new instead of just pixels, which comes in handy for those cases where the AI ​​has to render more complicated elements like the light or even suspended dust particles that we see in some games.

Combining the frames generated as standard by DLSS, together with the new ones of DLSS 3, we will have a super resolution. Ultimately, this means gamers will be able to enjoy high frame rates and enhanced graphics while gaming, creating super immersive experiences.

DLSS 3 operation

As we have explained before, DLSS 3 is not a completely new version of DLSS. The backbone of DLSS 3 is the same super resolution technology that is available in DLSS games.

What makes Optical Multi-Frame Generation different from existing technology is that this process generates new frames instead of pixels.

The Iartificial intelligence is used to fill in the blanks and interpret what should appear on the screen when the images are rendered in real time, providing a huge performance boost compared to basic DLSS.

This addition means that lighting and shadows, as well as effects such as flying dust, will behave more realistically and be less demanding on the GPU.

The technology powered by the Tensor cores, also collaborates with the new advances made to generate faithful and precise images compared to the native performance. Thanks to the combination of these two technologies, you will get much higher frame rates and higher resolutions.

And it is that, if you are not able to reach 60 FPS in your GPU, for example, the RTX 3060 on DLSS compatible titles, just turn that option on in the settings and see how performance improves.

in the following image We leave you a comparison between DLSS off and DLSS 3 on:

However, in certain games, DLSS may have some disadvantages like motion blur, ghosting, bad aliasing (texture smoothing), etc. DLSS 2 fixed these kinds of issues and DLSS 3 brings even more fixes with better graphics quality and FPS.

In this sample of Cyberpunk 2077we see that DLSS 3 increases FPS up to 4 times or more (4.3):

This can also be seen in the Microsoft Flight Simulator demo. Without DLSS, the performance is around 60 FPS, but with DLSS 3 on, the frame rate doubles to over 120.

This is a huge jump that shows that some games they could finally reach a higher frame rate without problems.

What games are compatible with DLSS 3?

NVIDIA has stated that more than 35 games and applications have announced their support for DLSS 3, and that the software comes to popular game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine 4 and 5.

we leave you the complete list of all the games that have announced their compatibility with DLSS 3:

• A Plague Tale: Requiem
• Conqueror’s Blade
• Dying Light 2 Stay Human
• Hogwarts Legacy
• Microsoft Flight Simulator
• Atomic Heart
• Cyberpunk 2077
• F1 22
• ICARUS
• Midnight Ghost Hunt
• Black Myth: Wukong
• Dakar-Rally
• FIST: Forged In Shadow Torch
• Jurassic World Evolution 2
• Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord
• Bright Memory: Infinite
• Deliver Us March
• Frostbite Engine
• Justice
• Naraka: Bladepoint
• Chernobylite
• Destroy All Humans! 2 – Failed
• hitman 3
• loopmancer
• Portal with RTX
• ripout
• STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl
• scath
• Sword and Fairy 7
• SYNCED
• The Lord of the Rings: Gollum
• The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
• THRONE AND LIBERTY
• Tower of Fantasy
• Warhammer 40,000: Darktide

AMD FSR 2.0: Tries to catch up but can’t. AI makes the difference

AMD’s answer to DLSS is called FSR or FidelityFX Super Resolution. FSR takes a very different approach than DLSS. Rather than being hardware-based, it is a software-based solution that can work across multiple series of GPUs.

Your alternative to fight against DLSS 3, is FSR 2.0. AMD’s FSR 2.0 does not use AI and frankly it can compete against DLSS, however, with the arrival of this third version, things change.

The Optical Flow Accelerator, which, together with the 4th generation Tensor Cores, create what is known as Optical Multi-Frame Generation, is the big point of difference. And it is that, although the optical flow is not something new, this, mixed with machine learning is relatively new due to the increase in data sets to train AI models.

AI collaborates by reducing visual errorsas we have explained before, related to light or reflections if it is trained enough and does not have so much overhead at runtime.

So far, AMD has confirmed that FSR can work on RX 6000, RX 5000, RX 500 and even GTX 1000 series GPUs. It has also been tested on RTX cards. and it works just as well. It’s kinda weird and funny that AMD offers these features for older NVIDIA cards while NVIDIA drops them altogether.

The big question to answer: is DLSS worth it? Some of its disadvantages

Most of the time, the answer is definitely yes. However, this is not always the case. If you have an RTX card, there is no reason not to enable this feature if you want to get some extra FPS, unless you are bothered by some of the negative effects it has.

And it is that, we speak of two disadvantages of DLSS. First of all, has to be implemented manually in video gamesand it is that, it is not a simple option that can be activated or deactivated in the NVIDIA configuration.

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The second drawback is that it is exclusive to RTX GPUs. Also, as new generations of these are released, new versions of DLSS may not be available for older RTX cards. For example, DLSS 3 is only available for RTX 4000 graphics cards as we have already announced at the beginning.

Regarding compatibility with games, there are probably about 200 different titles that have some version of DLSS available. Ok, it’s not a particularly small number but there are thousands of games on the market and there are many that will never support DLSS (especially indies), which is something to keep in mind when buying an RTX GPU.

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Finally, to highlight an aspect not touched on until now, and that is that, AI generated frames increase latency. We talk about the AI ​​frame being “fake” so you won’t see it in FPS readings in games.

So the latency doesn’t go down despite having so many extra frames, and due to the computational overhead of optical flow, the latency actually goes up.

Usually, DLSS is an amazing technology and NVIDIA with the evolution to DLSS 3 has made it much more effective and efficient.