Nvidia's DLSS Reaches VR With "No Man's Sky" and Two Other Titles

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VR-y good.

No Man's Sky
(Image credit: Hello Games)

Nvidia today announced that Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) has made the jump to VR thanks to support from No Man's Sky, Wrench, and Into The Radius.

The company said "DLSS doubles your VR performance at the Ultra graphics preset and maintains 90 FPS on an Oculus Quest 2 with a GeForce RTX 3080" in No Man's Sky, boosts Wrench's performance up to 80%, and "greatly reduces shimmering and stair-stepping on objects and foliage" in Into The Radius via improved anti-aliasing.

Here are Nvidia's performance results for the VR edition of No Man's Sky with and without DLSS enabled. Note that actual improvements will vary by system, driver version, and the whims of whichever higher being decides the exact number of frames per second a given system can provide in a particular title.

Nvidia performance results No Man's Sky

(Image credit: Nvidia)

DLSS seems like a natural fit for VR. Nvidia developed the technology in an effort to improve performance and presentation, both of which are critical to games played on a pair of displays held mere inches away from the player's eyeballs. Any improvement to either of those factors make for a better VR experience.

Six other titles will also introduce DLSS support this month: Amid Evil, Metro Exodus: PC Enhanced Edition, Everspace 2, Aron's Adventure, Scavengers, and Redout: Space Assault. Nvidia said the games saw performance bumps from 40% (Scavengers) to 100% (Metro Exodus) and that several will offer ray-tracing support as well.

These additions bring the total number of DLSS-compatible titles to 50 while simultaneously expanding the technology to VR. Its continued growth seems all-but-inevitable thanks to new integrations with Unreal Engine, Unity, and potentially the next Nintendo Switch making it more appealing than ever to game developers.

Nvidia should soon have some competition, in the form of AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution. That's supposed to provide a cross-platform alternative to DLSS that works on hardware from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia alike rather than being exclusive to Nvidia hardware that features the company's RTX Tensor Cores.

Nathaniel Mott
Nathaniel Mott
Freelance News & Features Writer

Nathaniel Mott is a freelance news and features writer for Tom's Hardware US, covering breaking news, security, and the silliest aspects of the tech industry.

3 Comments Comment from the forums
  • -Fran-
    I can wholeheartedly agree to this, yes.

    The best use case is VR, more so than "pretty reflections at playable framerate". While current methods for upscaling in VR work well, I'm willing to say DLSS would provide way better image quality at the same performance level.

    I'm so suprised nVidia hasn't really tried to market it towards VR much, if at all.

    Anyway, too bad it's a proprietary thing I can't use with AMD. For VR specifically, I'll still take AMD over nVidia due to VRAM capacity and just better overall performance per watt this generation for raster.

    Cheers!
    Reply
  • daworstplaya
    Now we just need all the VR devs to start adopting this into their titles. SMS studios are you paying attention? Project Cars 4 with DLSS 2.1 in VR please!
    Reply
  • cryoburner
    ...both of which are critical to games played on a pair of displays held mere inches away from the player's eyeballs.
    The actual physical distance of the screens from one's eyes isn't relevant in itself, since the lenses effectively make those screens appear as if they were much larger screens positioned a couple meters or so away. What matters is that the image is stretched across a relatively wide field of view, making pixels appear larger, and the image follows the position of one's head, so low frame rates tend to cause more discomfort.
    Reply