Until now NVidia has been very circumspect about how DLSS is supposed to improve performance.
But there were more beans spilled today, and it looks like their real reason is they run at lower resolution and upscale:
https://devblogs.nvidia.com/nvidia-turing-architecture-in-depth/
Lower input resolution, and half the shading work. Imply checkerboard rending to me.
So no surprise it is much faster, when it is likely cutting to half size rending, like some PS4 games.
Also we now find out there is a DLSS 2X mode, that seems to render at Native resolution and then does more complex DL network operations for much higher quality:
It kind of looks like were were marketed the performance benefits of regular DLSS (without being told it runs at lower resolution), and quality benefits of DLSS 2X, which was unknown until today, and comes with an unknown performance hit.
I am a little less impressed with DLSS than I was before.
But there were more beans spilled today, and it looks like their real reason is they run at lower resolution and upscale:
https://devblogs.nvidia.com/nvidia-turing-architecture-in-depth/
"Whereas TAA renders at the final target resolution and then combines frames, subtracting detail, DLSS allows faster rendering at a lower input resolution, and then infers a result that at target resolution is similar quality to the TAA result, but with half the shading work. "
Lower input resolution, and half the shading work. Imply checkerboard rending to me.
So no surprise it is much faster, when it is likely cutting to half size rending, like some PS4 games.
Also we now find out there is a DLSS 2X mode, that seems to render at Native resolution and then does more complex DL network operations for much higher quality:
"DLSS 2X. In this case, DLSS input is rendered at the final target resolution and then combined by a larger DLSS network to produce an output image that approaches the level of the 64x super sample rendering – a result that would be impossible to achieve in real time by any traditional means. Figure 21 shows DLSS 2X mode in operation, providing image quality very close to the reference 64x super-sampled image."
It kind of looks like were were marketed the performance benefits of regular DLSS (without being told it runs at lower resolution), and quality benefits of DLSS 2X, which was unknown until today, and comes with an unknown performance hit.
I am a little less impressed with DLSS than I was before.