Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS)

With each new architecture, NVIDIA makes it a point to introduce new image quality enhancement features. Since Turing packs Tensor cores, specialized components that accelerate deep-learning neural networks, this year's cool new AA algorithm bears its name: Deep Learning Super-Sampling, or DLSS. This feature leverages a neural net that's predefined, accelerated by Tensor cores, which extracts multi-dimensional features of a scene being rendered, combining details gathered from multiple frames, to try and reconstruct some of the details in the final output.

DLSS is, as you've guessed, a post-processing AA algorithm. What's more, the neural nets aren't smart enough to guess what just about anything should look like, and hence need to be fed "ground truth data" that is game-specific, via ground updates, so it has an idea of what a Cacodemon from "Doom" looks like, and how it's different from Pac-Man or a Chomper from "Plants vs. Zombies."

At the time of writing, the latest version of the Final Fantasy XV benchmark supports DLSS, and we put the card through it. We're trying to explore the performance impact of DLSS 2x vs. traditional Temporal AA 2x, along with screenshots showing image quality.

NVIDIA RTX Ray-tracing: Is it Worth Something?

RTX technology is the star attraction with "Turing," and it aims to enable ray-traced elements for 3D scenes that have been rendered by traditional rasterization. Not everything on your screen is ray traced because we're not quite there yet with the hardware muscle needed to pull that off.



A small but growing list of upcoming AAA games support RTX; below are some screenshots from the RTX demo designed on Unreal Engine using "Star Wars" assets Phasma and a couple of Storm Troopers. The subjects here are the accurate, ray-traced reflections off Phasma's chrome-finished exoskeleton. These reflections aren't reflection maps but ray-traced. You'll also see reflections off the trooper's visor and glossy white armor. The demo looks stunning, and we can only imagine how AAA game developers can take it forward. The demo had some artifacts, but that's probably because it was put together quickly and is a beta, rather than a flaw in RTX.

Upcoming Futuremark DirectX Ray-Tracing Benchmark

RTX is an extension of the DirectX Ray-Tracing API (DXR) introduced with Windows 10 Redstone 5. An upcoming version of 3DMark will include a whole new benchmark (i.e. not a rendition of "Time Spy"), which will leverage DXR to test some of the ray-tracing features of next-generation GPUs, including "Turing." Below are some of its screenshots, which are photographs of our monitor, as the benchmark won't allow us to take screenshots. At this time, we are not allowed to post performance numbers of this benchmark as it's still under development. It only serves to test your GPU's feature set.



The scene shows a spacecraft that is docked and being inspected by probes that shine scanning beams onto its various surfaces. Some of this looks simple enough to accomplish with rasterization and reflection maps, but won't look nearly as accurate without ray tracing.