NVIDIA announced today an expansion of RTX and DLSS for plenty of Windows games, and for Linux users there's something exciting coming too: NVIDIA will hook up DLSS with DirectX 11 and 12 with Proton in September.
What is DLSS? NVIDIA DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) is an AI-powered rendering tech to help increase performance for NVIDIA GPUs using their dedicated Tensor Core AI processors. It helps to boost framerates by rendering frames at a lower resolution and then it's made to look much crispier using deep learning.
Currently DLSS on Linux with Proton only works with Vulkan titles but that's about to change in September. In their announcement they said:
Recently, we launched support for NVIDIA DLSS in Proton, enabling Linux gamers to play Vulkan API games with NVIDIA DLSS, including DOOM Eternal, No Man’s Sky, and Wolfenstein: Youngblood. Next month, support extends to dozens of DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 games, including Control, Cyberpunk 2077, Death Stranding, F1 2020, Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries, and Necromunda: Hired Gun.
Stay tuned for further details.
Some of the work is live now on GitHub in Pull Requests to get it all working with Proton:
- dxvk-nvapi - "Nvapi: add new NvAPI implementation"
- dxvk-nvapi - "Implement the required NvAPI entrypoints for D3D11 DLSS support"
- VKD3D-Proton - "vkd3d: Add new interfaces: ID3D12DeviceExt, ID3D12GraphicsCommandListExt"
- DXVK - "Implement DXVK pieces required for DX11 DLSS support"
Last edited by skinnyraf on 24 August 2021 at 1:25 pm UTC
aufkrawall Aug 24, 2021
Wouldn't a unified Vulkan extension make sense to allow usage of XMX/TCs without vendor exclusive APIs?
slaapliedje Aug 24, 2021
QuoteLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) is an AI-powered rendering tech to help increase performance for NVIDIA GPUs using their dedicated Tensor Core AI processors. It helps to boost framerates by rendering frames at a lower resolution and then it's made to look much crispier using deep learning.
Translating it from marketing terms to normal ones, it's an upscaling technology. Idea of any upscaling is to render at lower resolution (which allows better performance, i.e. framerate) and try to compensate the reduction of quality with some smart tricks to make it good enough.
Overall, I'd say GPUs are improving in general and upscaling isn't really that critical, unless for some reason you insist on using very high resolution and want to make GPUs cope with it. But the question you can ask, is high resolution using upscaling better than lower resolution without upscaling?
Last edited by Shmerl on 24 August 2021 at 6:06 pm UTC
Man that game is awesome. I am 100% addicted.
Quoting: BeamboomOh yay - this might mean both better performance and visuals for Cyberpunk 2077, doesn't it?
Man that game is awesome. I am 100% addicted.
Performance yes, but visuals is a moot thing. Visuals should be better without upscaling in general.
I agree about the game - it's very good. I'm playing it now.
Last edited by Shmerl on 24 August 2021 at 6:25 pm UTC
aufkrawall Aug 24, 2021
Quoting: ShmerlPerformance yes, but visuals is a moot thing. Visuals should be better without upscaling in general.DL backed TSSAA can solve many aspects of aliasing and upscaling better in lower resolution than traditional TSSAA in native one.
The TAA in CyberPunk also isn't really good, combined with CAS I really find DLSS "Quality" scaling factor to look better than native (with the "magic" 2.2.6 version of DLSS, of which Nvidia doesn't seem to know why it looks better than previous and later versions). It definitely looks that good in a number of games, e.g. also in Fortnite and Doom Eternal.
Last edited by aufkrawall on 24 August 2021 at 6:46 pm UTC
aufkrawall Aug 24, 2021
Quoting: ShmerlI think it's still not a universal benefit. So better for them to come up with smart antialiasing without any upscaling if they want to make things better across the board.Despite of upsampling, the benefits are still so distinct that it makes native resolution rendering look like a total waste of computing power. I think actually the opposite should take place: Game developers should tweak the graphics in such a way that lower resolution doesn't negatively affect shadow drawing distance etc. so that upsampling can be used with less visual degradation. It would eat upa a few per cent of the performance gains, but chances are you can gain even more by lowering render resolution and still have a similarly good looking image.
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