Nvidia unveils DLSS 3.5 & you won’t need a new GPU to use it

Nvidia has announced DLSS 3.5, a new supersampling technique that aims to improve how your RTX GPU renders ray-traced lighting.

There’s a new version of Nvidia’s popular DLSS supersampling tech coming to their RTX graphics cards, named DLSS 3.5. Rather than focusing entirely on gaining performance through the rendering methods, this aims to improve ray tracing while using DLSS.

Ray tracing is a software rendering technique that attempts to emulate real-world lighting as much as possible. This means allowing the light to “naturally” fall where it would. Usually, this technique is saved for pre-rendered images. It often incorporates things like water or mirror reflections.

For games, real-time ray tracing can be excruciatingly difficult, but with software like DLSS, it can become much easier. The new method of rendering raytracing through DLSS 3.5 is being dubbed “Raytracing Reconstruction” by Nvidia.

The technique is all in the name, as it will utilize its massive algorithm to look at a ray-traced image and “reconstruct” it to look sharper. Nvidia claims it’s different from current denoisers, one of the industry standards for clearing up images. Team Green has also trained the software on five times more information than DLSS 3.

Nvidia shows off how DLSS 3.5 works

In a flowchart, Nvidia showed off exactly what DLSS 3.5 was looking for to reconstruct images properly. Of course, they then blow up the 1080p image to 4K, as an end result.

The end result is a supposed more accurate rendition of how the light and reflections are supposed to look. In images from Cyberpunk 2077, you can see how it generates a more accurate light cone from the car, rather than it spilling outwards.

Nvidia

It also sharpens up images reflected in water sources, as well as generally bringing a little more life to the ray traced sources.

DLSS 3.5 also appears to bring a small modicum of performance boosts as well. According to the graphs, with super-resolution, frame generation, and ray reconstruction, achieves eight additional frames. This is due to the hardware not having to work as hard once DLSS is applied.

What games support DLSS 3.5?

As of right now, Nvidia has only announced Cyberpunk 2077 and its expansion, Phantom Liberty, along with Portal with RTX and Alan Wake 2.

DLSS 3.5 helps ease the pains of raytracing

Matt Wuebbling, VP of Marketing at NVIDIA said:

“Fully ray-traced lighting in real-time was a significant milestone on our journey to photorealistic graphics in games, and we met those goals with Cyberpunk 2077’s RT Overdrive Mode, Minecraft with RTX, and Portal with RTX.

“With the addition of Ray Reconstruction in NVIDIA DLSS 3.5, developers are aided by AI to enhance the worlds they create by increasing image quality further than previously thought possible.”

And on the upcoming Alan Wake 2, which will be getting DLSS 3.5 support, Tatu Aalto, Lead Graphics Programmer at Remedy Entertainment said:

“The new Ray Reconstruction feature in DLSS 3.5 renders our fully ray-traced world more beautifully than ever before, bringing you deeper into the story of Alan Wake 2.”

Which Nvidia GPUs support DLSS 3.5?

Nvidia is bringing DLSS 3.5 to all of its RTX GPUs, despite keeping DLSS 3 off of anything other than the RTX 40-series. While frame generation is still being withheld, ray reconstruction should hit everything with the RTX branding on it.