Nvidia might finally put the "but will it run Crysis?" meme to pasture. Today, the company announced that it had added DLSS support to Crysis Remastered, the System Shock remake's demo, and the upcoming adventure title The Fabled Woods.
The first version of Nvidia DLSS, which stands for Deep Learning Super Sampling, debuted in 2018 alongside its Turing architecture GPUs. It was originally said to simultaneously offer improved visuals and performance in supported titles.
Our initial tests showed that DLSS excelled in some areas but would occasionally pull back the curtain, as it were, by making it clear an image was upscaled. The result was a compelling feature that couldn't always meet the high expectations Nvidia set.
DLSS 2.0 debuted in 2020 with a twice-as-fast AI model, easier integration for game developers, and greater control over the feature's implementation for people who wanted to choose performance or presentation would be prioritized.
The feature's appeal is two-fold. It can allow weaker graphics cards to run games at resolutions that would otherwise be beyond their capabilities, sure, but it can also help high-end options meet the demands of their performance-hungry owners. DLSS is essentially the rising tide that raises all (GeForce-branded) ships.
Nvidia said in today's announcement that DLSS could offer significant performance improvements in titles like System Shock. These figures should be taken with a grain of salt—the actual performance bump will vary by system—but they're worth noting:
(Image credit: Nvidia)
That means System Shock's demo could offer more than 100 additional frames per second on some of the best gaming graphics cards on the market. Again, the actual performance improvements will vary, but Nvidia's tests show a significant bump.
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The company didn't offer similar details about Crysis Remastered, but it did say The Fabled Woods could see “performance boosts of up to 1.6x at 4K” with “maxed out settings and all ray tracing effects enabled at over 60 FPS at 3840x2160” on an RTX 3070 or better in the same setup used for its System Shock tests. Curious gamers can try out DLSS in Crysis Remastered now and The Fabled Woods on March 25.
Nvidia said "there are now nearly 40 games" with DLSS support and that "there are many more implementations of these technologies waiting in the wings to be announced and released in the coming weeks and months." (Emphasis Nvidia's.)
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.
Maybe some day, with a DLSS 3.0, it'll be a driver wide feature.
I really hope that's true, that'll be when DLSS reaches its glory days is when its a driver based feature, that can plug into any game, just like a sharpening filter.
