Everyone and their dog is still angry over the outrageous pricing of NVIDIA's RTX 4000 series.
But if you're trying to figure out some way to justify the expense,
it's worth considering their DLSS 3.0, the newest version of Team Green's AI-powered tech that gives you much better
performance in games without absolutely thrashing your GPU. And it's only officially available on the 4000 series.
So, is it worth it? If you're not familiar with NVIDIA's previous generations of DLSS,
here's a quick primer. The basic idea is that instead of asking your GPU to render every frame at your preferred resolution from scratch,
it uses a machine learning algorithm that runs on special
tensor cores that live on your graphics card. This algorithm attempts to upscale images with little to no discernible quality loss.
So, if your card is having a difficult time rendering a game at, say, 1080p,
the idea is that you enable DLSS, set it to performance, and instead you just have your GPU cores render the game at 540p
with DLSS filling in the blanks to give you a 1080p image that is almost as good as native resolution for far less
computational effort. But the specifics of how the AI works have gone through several revisions.
DLSS 1.0, released in 2019, relied on a neural network that was trained against
specific games by a supercomputer at an NVIDIA facility.
Reception to the feature was mixed at the time, but DLSS 2.0 was much more warmly received when it debuted in 2020.
Not only did 2.0 run better on your card's tensor course,
but it had a more generalized AI model that was still generated by NVIDIA's supercomputer,
but didn't have to be trained on specific games, making it more broadly applicable.
The big change with DLSS 3.0 is what Team Green is calling the Optical Flow Accelerator.
It kind of sounds like a part of a time-traveling DeLorean,
but what it's actually doing is inserting entirely new frames between the ones that your GPU has already rendered.
Here's how it works. The AI examines two sequential frames from the game you're playing,
specifically looking for how the pixels are moving from frame to frame.
Each pixel is examined for changes in lighting, reflections, and particle behavior
to create what NVIDIA calls an optical flow field, basically a model of pixel movement.
DLSS also keeps track of how geometry in the game changes,
such as how the road moves below the character on their motorcycle in the example that we're showing.
Although it is possible to generate frames for smoother motion just by looking at geometry,
quality can suffer as other effects like lighting won't be tracked correctly,
as you can see in this example where the shadow cast by the motorcycle is distorted.
But DLSS 3.0 combines the optical flow field with geometry tracking to give more accurate inserted frames,
giving you significantly higher frame rates while maintaining image accuracy.
It'll be interesting to see just how high you can push frame rates in popular games,
now that DLSS is inserting entire artificial frames in between frames that were already
being upscaled by DLSS. NVIDIA is claiming that your GPU only has to render one eighth
of the pixels that it would have to for similar performance and quality without DLSS.
Unfortunately, the official line from NVIDIA is that DLSS 3.0 is only supported on the new
RTX 4000 series of cards, though a report has already come out that the restriction is due to
a simple software lock. One player was able to bypass it and double his performance in the
notoriously demanding Cyberpunk 2077 while using a now two generations old RTX 2070,
though there were some stability issues. We're going to keep our fingers crossed that NVIDIA
will officially remove this restriction in the near future, especially since they probably
want to clear out some stock of their existing 3000 series products. Keep in mind though,
even if it does happen, it's unlikely to work as well as it should on 4000 series due to its less
powerful hardware. Another caveat of DLSS is that it's still a very sophisticated form of guessing
as to what an individual frame should look like. So depending on your game and your specific hardware,
your mileage may vary and it could add significant latency to your gameplay even if the image quality
is great. So maybe DLSS 4.0 will come out with such a good AI that it can render artificial frames
and even play the game for me? I can only hope.