Along with the new Blackwell family of video cards, Nvidia introduced a new image scaling technology, DLSS 4. All video cards of the GeForce RTX family will be able to work with it, and on the day of its debut, 75 popular games will receive support for the technology.
Image source: nvidia.com
The biggest innovation in Nvidia DLSS 4 was the transition from convolutional neural networks to a transformer model, which has twice as many parameters as neural networks in previous versions of DLSS. This means greater image stability, reduced artifacts, smoother object edges and more detailed motion – simply put, improved image quality. Also in DLSS 4, a new technology DLSS Multi-Frame Generation has appeared – an improved version of the basic Frame Generation for GeForce RTX 50 series video cards: for every frame drawn, they generate three more. This, combined with architectural improvements, allowed Nvidia to talk about a twofold increase in the performance of new generation video cards.
The developer has deployed new artificial intelligence models responsible for Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing (DLAA), DLSS Super Resolution, DLSS Frame Generation and DLSS Ray Reconstruction. This, Nvidia said, helped DLSS outpace other upscaling technologies. In the case of DLSS Frame Generation, the use of video memory resources was reduced by 30%, and the speed of the technology increased by 40%. Warhammer 40,000: Darktide increased the frame rate by 10% and freed up 400 MB of video memory.
All video cards received support for Nvidia DLSS 4, but older ones did not fully support them. The RTX 20 and RTX 30 series models will feature DLSS Super Resolution, DLAA and DLSS Ray Reconstruction; on RTX 40 – an improved version of DLSS Frame Generation; and DLSS Multi-Frame Generation is only available with RTX 50 graphics cards, made possible by improved Tensor cores on those models.
This means that 4K resolution monitors with a high refresh rate now make practical sense – previously, many gamers were perplexed as to why 240 Hz is needed at 4K if video cards cannot cope with such a picture. Now they can cope, and there is a need for even faster displays. On launch day, Nvidia DLSS 4 will be supported by 75 games and applications, including titles such as Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2 and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.