WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.200 Everyone and their dog is still angry over the outrageous pricing of NVIDIA's RTX 4000 series. 00:00:06.440 --> 00:00:10.400 But if you're trying to figure out some way to justify the expense, 00:00:10.480 --> 00:00:18.080 it's worth considering their DLSS 3.0, the newest version of Team Green's AI-powered tech that gives you much better 00:00:18.240 --> 00:00:25.840 performance in games without absolutely thrashing your GPU. And it's only officially available on the 4000 series. 00:00:25.960 --> 00:00:31.800 So, is it worth it? If you're not familiar with NVIDIA's previous generations of DLSS, 00:00:31.800 --> 00:00:39.640 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, 00:00:39.800 --> 00:00:43.000 it uses a machine learning algorithm that runs on special 00:00:43.320 --> 00:00:51.640 tensor cores that live on your graphics card. This algorithm attempts to upscale images with little to no discernible quality loss. 00:00:52.000 --> 00:00:56.760 So, if your card is having a difficult time rendering a game at, say, 1080p, 00:00:56.960 --> 00:01:05.320 the idea is that you enable DLSS, set it to performance, and instead you just have your GPU cores render the game at 540p 00:01:05.400 --> 00:01:12.800 with DLSS filling in the blanks to give you a 1080p image that is almost as good as native resolution for far less 00:01:13.160 --> 00:01:19.960 computational effort. But the specifics of how the AI works have gone through several revisions. 00:01:20.680 --> 00:01:25.880 DLSS 1.0, released in 2019, relied on a neural network that was trained against 00:01:26.320 --> 00:01:29.720 specific games by a supercomputer at an NVIDIA facility. 00:01:30.160 --> 00:01:37.880 Reception to the feature was mixed at the time, but DLSS 2.0 was much more warmly received when it debuted in 2020. 00:01:38.000 --> 00:01:41.520 Not only did 2.0 run better on your card's tensor course, 00:01:41.600 --> 00:01:46.840 but it had a more generalized AI model that was still generated by NVIDIA's supercomputer, 00:01:46.840 --> 00:01:52.160 but didn't have to be trained on specific games, making it more broadly applicable. 00:01:52.320 --> 00:01:58.280 The big change with DLSS 3.0 is what Team Green is calling the Optical Flow Accelerator. 00:01:58.480 --> 00:02:01.760 It kind of sounds like a part of a time-traveling DeLorean, 00:02:01.760 --> 00:02:09.360 but what it's actually doing is inserting entirely new frames between the ones that your GPU has already rendered. 00:02:09.720 --> 00:02:15.080 Here's how it works. The AI examines two sequential frames from the game you're playing, 00:02:15.080 --> 00:02:19.080 specifically looking for how the pixels are moving from frame to frame. 00:02:19.600 --> 00:02:24.040 Each pixel is examined for changes in lighting, reflections, and particle behavior 00:02:24.040 --> 00:02:29.920 to create what NVIDIA calls an optical flow field, basically a model of pixel movement. 00:02:30.160 --> 00:02:33.640 DLSS also keeps track of how geometry in the game changes, 00:02:33.880 --> 00:02:38.520 such as how the road moves below the character on their motorcycle in the example that we're showing. 00:02:39.000 --> 00:02:43.880 Although it is possible to generate frames for smoother motion just by looking at geometry, 00:02:43.880 --> 00:02:48.600 quality can suffer as other effects like lighting won't be tracked correctly, 00:02:48.600 --> 00:02:53.080 as you can see in this example where the shadow cast by the motorcycle is distorted. 00:02:53.480 --> 00:03:00.760 But DLSS 3.0 combines the optical flow field with geometry tracking to give more accurate inserted frames, 00:03:00.760 --> 00:03:05.080 giving you significantly higher frame rates while maintaining image accuracy. 00:03:05.320 --> 00:03:09.080 It'll be interesting to see just how high you can push frame rates in popular games, 00:03:09.080 --> 00:03:14.760 now that DLSS is inserting entire artificial frames in between frames that were already 00:03:14.760 --> 00:03:21.160 being upscaled by DLSS. NVIDIA is claiming that your GPU only has to render one eighth 00:03:21.160 --> 00:03:26.120 of the pixels that it would have to for similar performance and quality without DLSS. 00:03:26.760 --> 00:03:32.120 Unfortunately, the official line from NVIDIA is that DLSS 3.0 is only supported on the new 00:03:32.200 --> 00:03:37.400 RTX 4000 series of cards, though a report has already come out that the restriction is due to 00:03:37.400 --> 00:03:42.360 a simple software lock. One player was able to bypass it and double his performance in the 00:03:42.360 --> 00:03:49.080 notoriously demanding Cyberpunk 2077 while using a now two generations old RTX 2070, 00:03:49.080 --> 00:03:53.160 though there were some stability issues. We're going to keep our fingers crossed that NVIDIA 00:03:53.160 --> 00:03:57.320 will officially remove this restriction in the near future, especially since they probably 00:03:57.320 --> 00:04:01.880 want to clear out some stock of their existing 3000 series products. Keep in mind though, 00:04:01.880 --> 00:04:07.640 even if it does happen, it's unlikely to work as well as it should on 4000 series due to its less 00:04:07.640 --> 00:04:14.360 powerful hardware. Another caveat of DLSS is that it's still a very sophisticated form of guessing 00:04:14.360 --> 00:04:19.960 as to what an individual frame should look like. So depending on your game and your specific hardware, 00:04:19.960 --> 00:04:26.200 your mileage may vary and it could add significant latency to your gameplay even if the image quality 00:04:26.200 --> 00:04:32.760 is great. So maybe DLSS 4.0 will come out with such a good AI that it can render artificial frames 00:04:32.760 --> 00:04:35.880 and even play the game for me? I can only hope.