Nvidia reveals DLSS 3 for boosting PC games even further

DLSS 3 is coming to Nvidia’s Lovelace GPUs

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Nvidiahas announced DLSS 3 - it’s next generation of Deep Learning Super Sampling technology that uses machine learning to upscale games, bringing huge performance improvements with minimal impact to graphical quality.

In the past we’ve been really impressed with how DLSS has allowed games to perform even better, especially when using intensive graphical effects like ray tracing, so this new version is very exciting.

It seems that DLSS 3 will be exclusive to Nvidia’s new GPUs that it also just announced: theRTX 4090and two variants of theRTX 4080.

Big boosts

According to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, DLSS 3 can boost performance by up to four times, compared to running a game at native resolution.

Nvidia showed off some of the expected improvements that’ll come with DLSS 3, with graphically-intensive Cyberpunk 2077 going from 30fps to around 100fps. With DLSS 2, it only reached 60fps with the same settings.

MicrosoftFlight Simulator was also boosted by DLSS 3, in footage shown by Nvidia, with the frame rate of the intensive flight sim going from around 50fps to over 100fps.

While Nvidia has been cagey about what kind of settings and hardware was used, the potential here is huge, especially considering how impressive previous versions of DLSS have been.

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Behind the scenes

According to Nvidia, DLSS 3 uses technology including  Optical Multi Frame Generation, which doesn’t just render new pixels, but can intelligently add new frames, helping to boost performance and responsiveness - and can now help with CPU-limited games, where the processor in agaming laptopor desktop is holding games back.

Meanwhile, Optical Flow Accelerator in DLSS 3 can reduce stutter by tracking objects in scenes (and not just pixels).

Nvidia says over 35 games and apps are going to make use of DLSS 3 when the first RTX 40-series cards launch later this year, and it has provided a list of confirmed DLSS 3 titles:

Matt is TechRadar’s Managing Editor for Core Tech, looking after computing and mobile technology. Having written for a number of publications such as PC Plus, PC Format, T3 and Linux Format, there’s no aspect of technology that Matt isn’t passionate about, especially computing and PC gaming. He’s personally reviewed and used most of the laptops in our best laptops guide - and since joining TechRadar in 2014, he’s reviewed over 250 laptops and computing accessories personally.

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