Nvidia today via a blog post announced a veritable slew of upcoming games with support for the company's proprietary DLSS technology and ray tracing, either at launch or via development updates. The green company's monopoly on upscale technologies may be in the process of being challenged left and right, by AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (AMD FSR) and the upcoming Intel XeSS. However, Nvidia is riding the momentum of being the first adopter, leveraging its relations with game developers and game engines to bring DLSS support to as many titles as it can before its competitors flood the market with their own solutions.
While Nvidia may take this opportunity to extol its virtues in the ray tracing realm, nothing should stand in the way of AMD users activating ray tracing effects on their RX 6000 series graphics cards — raytracing itself isn't proprietary, unlike DLSS. However, as we've shown in our look at Nvidia vs. AMD Ray Tracing, Nvidia does offer generally superior ray tracing performance, and that's without enabling DLSS.
Nvidia also took to this blog post to announce something that will surely make Linux gamers happy: Next month, the company will extend DLSS support to dozens (emphasis ours) of DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 games, including Control, Cyberpunk 2077, Death Stranding, F1 2020, Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries, and Necromunda: Hired Gun, building upon the recently-introduced DLSS support for Linux under Steam's Proton layer.
First off on today's games announcement by Nvidia is Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, which will drop on October 26th. The PC version has been confirmed to support Nvidia's DLSS and ray traced reflections at launch.
Dying Light 2: Stay Human, the awaited sequel to the original Dying Light, will once again be looking to push the envelope on graphics and world rendering. The Techland-developed game will feature ray traced global illumination, shadows, and reflections, which covers most of the major uses of ray tracing features a game can tout. To aid in all those gazillion rays and their bounded intersections, Techland also supports DLSS, providing a much needed performance boost for ray tracing heavy games. Techland hasn't announced a hard release date, but the game should drop before the end of the year.
If you are a Myst fan, the games' remaster coming on August 26th is sure to have piqued your interest already. This is one of those games where graphics is one of the most important elements for immersion, and the latest iteration of the classic point-and-click adventure game will feature ray traced reflections and Nvidia DLSS. The addition of Nvidia's DLSS tech becomes all the more important when one considers that this particular release features support for VR headsets, where framerates are as important to immersion as they are to avoid the sometimes floor-spattering side effects of low performance in a VR environment. Nvidia promises that performance in Myst will be more than doubled via DLSS, and that the addition of Nvidia's machine-learning-based upsampling algorithm will allow for the game to render at up to 4864x2448 while maintaining the 90 fps VR target.
Another game featuring support for both DLSS and ray tracing (in the form of ray traced reflections and shadows) is SYNCED: Off-Planet, a PvPvE and co-op action game that's being developed by Tencent Studios.
This is just a selection of some of the games being showcased by Nvidia. Other games using Nvidia's technologies include Battlefield 2042 (DLSS and Nvidia Reflex support but no ray tracing technology, at least for launch), Bright Memory Infinite (ray traced reflections, shadows, caustics, and global illumination as well as DLSS), Loopmancer (ray traced reflections, shadows, and global illumination sans DLSS, so it remains to be seen how well the Unreal engine 4 game runs absent of the upsampling technology to claw back the framerate lost from all of that eye candy), and Faraday Protocol (a story-driven puzzle game built on Unreal Engine 4 that introduces support for DLSS.
Naraka Bladepoint is yet another game that will now feature DLSS, with the battle royale game also featuring support for Nvidia Reflex technologies. Cyberpunk twin-stick shooter The Ascent is already a well-known and excellent quantity, and supports Nvidia's DLSS as well as ray traced reflections and shadows. Black Myth: Wukong has dazzled audiences with its Unreal Engine 5 gameplay reveal from last week, and even if the game sheds ray tracing in favor of Unreal Engine 5's shader-based techniques, the pairing with Nvidia DLSS promises a performant and beautiful action adventure. Lastly, GRIT and Chivalry 2 will both see the addition of Nvidia DLSS for increased performance on any Nvidia RTX graphics card.
If you don't have a raytracing-compatible graphics card yet and want to play these games with the settings cranked up to the max, check out our list of the best graphics cards, and we wish you good luck in navigating the current GPU availability landscape.
