Introduction

Battlefield V continues to be the most heavily chronicled PC game launch in recent times, as developer EA-DICE adds new technologies in piecemeal fashion. Our day-one review walks you through the game's performance the day it launched, without DirectX Raytracing (DXR). A week later, Battlefield V was updated with DXR support, and we promptly put out its performance numbers, which were a disaster for both DICE and NVIDIA. A couple of weeks later, NVIDIA and DICE made good on their promise to improve performance of the game with DXR enabled. Today, we have with us our fourth performance review for Battlefield V, as DICE implemented the other killer feature of NVIDIA's RTX 20-series: DLSS. Deep Learning Super Sampling, or DLSS, is a fascinating method of improving image quality. While traditional pre- and post-processing anti-aliasing methods invariably levy a performance penalty on your machine in exchange for better visuals, DLSS not only strives to improve visuals on par with methods such as TAA (temporal anti-aliasing), but also improves performance of the game itself.



DLSS is the first major gaming application of the tensor cores on NVIDIA's "Turing" GPUs. Originally designed to accelerate building and training of deep-learning neural nets by accelerating matrix-multiplication, tensor cores can also be made to handle complex math within their limited fixed-function instruction set. DLSS works to improve the image quality of your game by rendering it at a lower resolution (this is what improves performance) and then attempting to reconstruct details based on ground-truth data obtained from NVIDIA through driver updates. You can also think of DLSS as a smart application-optimized sharpening algorithm. NVIDIA uses a large server farm to continuously render each scene in a game and build "ground truth" data for that specific game. Your GPU uses this data to reconstruct details.

NVIDIA purports DLSS to be an important feature for RTX 20-series users because it lets them make up a big chunk of performance lost by turning on RTX real-time raytracing. Despite all its refinements, Battlefield V ended up imposing a 20-30 % performance penalty (dubbed "RTX tax") for turning on DXR Reflections. DLSS lets you file returns on that tax. In this review, we explore the image quality obtained by turning on DLSS and its impact on performance. The comparison only includes numbers for the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, and we tested with both RTX and DirectX 12 enabled, using today's GeForce 418.91 driver and today's Battlefield V update on our VGA review test system.

Image Quality Side-by-Side Comparison

Hover the mouse sideways for a side-by-side comparison between DLSS-off and DLSS-on. You can also use your scroll wheel to zoom in. Graphics were set to "Ultra", which automatically sets raytracing quality to "ultra", too.