Early Review Shows DLSS 3 Amplification Works Best With Lower Native Frame Rates
Digital Foundry recently released Exclusive Premiere of DLSS 3 Performance With Nvidia’s new RTX 40-series Ada Lovelace GPUs. In this video, the RTX 4090 gave him a huge FPS boost and framerate up to 500%. However, tech outlets have also indicated flaws in DLSS 3, such as increased latency and AI-generated frame artifacts, which can cause unwanted side effects to the gameplay experience.
DLSS 3 is Nvidia’s revolution in deep learning supersampling and is now responsible for providing both image upscaling and frame generation simultaneously. This means that DLSS 3 upscales images (like DLSS 2) and produces AI-created images all by itself. Significantly improve frame rates without the help of traditional 3D rendering.
This does not mean that DLSS 2 will go away. Rather, there will be DLSS 2 and DLSS 3 in parallel, depending on what game developers want to implement. DLSS 3 is a frame amplified version of DLSS 2.
As a result, DLSS 2 quality presets (Quality, Balanced, Performance, etc.) can also be selected in DLSS 3.
The technology works by rendering two physical frames generated by the GPU core and upscaled by DLSS, then inserting the AI-generated frame directly in the middle of the other two frames. The result is a much higher frame rate, but a much higher input lag due to the latency of holding both frames to generate the AI frame.
To combat this, Nvidia requires all DLSS 3 enabled games to feature Nvidia reflex technology to keep input lag as low as possible.
DLSS 3 currently only supports RTX 40 series GPUs. This is due to the need for a more powerful optical flow accelerator, currently only present in the Ada Lovelace GPU microarchitecture. Nvidia says that technically his DLSS 3 can run on older generations of his RTX GPUs, but these older GPUs aren’t powerful enough to run his DLSS 3 well.
As a result, it’s technically possible that a DLSS 3 variant could make it to the RTX 20 and 30-series GPUs, but it’s highly unlikely. From a software optimization standpoint, it takes a miracle to make it work.
Performance characteristics
Digital Foundry was given three different titles featuring DLSS 3 integration. Cyberpunk 2077, Portal RTX, Spider-Man Remastered — All run on a GeForce RTX 4090. Due to embargo restrictions, Digital Foundry could only provide percentage-based uplift, not static frame rate results.
of Cyberpunk 2077At , Digital Foundry delivered a 3.9x performance improvement with DLSS 3 enabled compared to running the game at native 4k resolution. DLSS 3 is 2.5x slower than DLSS 2 in performance mode and “just” 2.5x faster than native resolution.
spiderman remastered DLSS 3 showed a significantly smaller performance boost as it only offers a 2x FPS multiplier for native 4k resolution. It was still much faster than the DLSS 2 performance mode, which only offered a 9% frame rate boost over native. (The reason for the poor performance of DLSS 2 is the CPU bottleneck.)
Portal RTX showed the biggest performance leap with DLSS 3 — a whopping 5.5x frame rate improvement over native 4k rendering. DLSS 3 was 2.2x faster than DLSS 2 in performance mode, while DLSS 2 Provides 3.3x performance improvement over native resolution. (It is worth noting that Portal RTX You can see in the YouTube video that it runs at around 20 FPS at 4k native. So the native framerate of this game is very low to begin with, especially on his RTX 4090).
Improved DLSS 3 performance at lower native frame rates
Digital Foundry’s analysis shows that DLSS 3 works best when the native frame rate is very low, and performance degrades as the native frame rate increases.this is clear Portal RTXyou can actually visually see the difference in frame rate from native to DLSS 2 and 3 versions.
this is, spiderman remastered, running the game at max settings on flagship hardware isn’t too difficult. And frame rates well above 60 FPS can easily be reached as long as there is no CPU bottleneck. This is why his DLSS 3 multiplication gain is the lowest in this title.
This side effect makes a lot of sense given how DLSS 3 works. DLSS 3 has to wait a few milliseconds to generate two full frames, render the AI image, and then release all three frames to the display. This additional latency causes the DLSS 3 frame rate increase to continually decrease as the overall frame rate increases.
However, even in high FPS environments, DLSS 3 still offers a higher FPS boost than DLSS 2 does in performance mode, so this seems to be an issue only above ultra-high frame rates (e.g. 700 FPS). increase.
In other words, DLSS 3 is overwatch When apex legendswhere input lag is as important as high FPS.
Input lag analysis
Digital Foundry shows that the combination of DLSS 3 and Nvidia Reflex is what really makes this technology shine.of Portal RTXDLSS 3’s input latency was cut in half at 56ms — compared to 95ms for native 4k rendering with Reflex enabled (it was 129ms with it off).
of Cyberpunk 2077, with different gains, but good for the DLSS 3/Nvidia Reflex combination. At native 4k with Reflex on, Digital Foundry saw an average of 62ms (108ms off). With DLSS 3 and Reflex this was reduced to 54 ms. But it had the lowest input lag, 31 ms with Reflex enabled and 42 ms with it disabled, his DLSS 2 in performance mode.
This same behavior is Spider-Man – 36ms input lag with Reflex on (39ms off) at native 4K. DLSS 3 and Reflex fell in between at 38ms. Also, DLSS 2 in performance mode showed the lowest input delay. 23 ms when Reflex is on, 24 ms when it is off.
Unfortunately DLSS 3 is not usable without Reflex, but the result of DLSS 2 performance mode is that when DLSS 3 is enabled, Nvidia Reflex technology relieves a lot of the burden and makes input lag playable. It shows that it is greatly reduced to the level.
image quality
Perhaps one of the most interesting topics surrounding DLSS 3 is the image quality of AI-generated frames. Digital Foundry also tested it and found DLSS 3 to be surprisingly good (but not perfect).
DLSS 3’s weakness seems to be hidden geometry. This is because the geometry overlaps another set of geometry during motion, so information is missing between the two frames. This can lead to ugly output artifacts as DLSS 3 “shutters” and tries to fill in the blanks for missing details.
But everything else about the image seems solid and has few issues.
Digital Foundry says they need to test DLSS 3 more thoroughly once they find more rigorous testing methods. In any case, I haven’t found a way to indicate if DLSS 3’s geometry issues are visible in real time, as the frame rate is so high in DLSS 3.
As far as we can tell, DLSS 3’s occasional artifacts don’t show up in real time, but due to YouTube’s compression and frame rate limitations, we have no idea what games with DLSS 3 actually look like. . Stay tuned for our own DLSS 3 tests in the near future.
