To nobody’s surprise, Nvidia is going full-on AI, placing DLSS front and centre of its RTX 50 Series graphics cards. Fake frames controversy be damned, it turns out that it’s AI-based upscaler is actually pretty popular already, as Team Green claims most of its user base already benefits from the single-click frame rate booster.
The brand shared an interesting slide that claims more than 80% of RTX players activate DLSS. Between them, they account for three billion cumulative hours of DLSS-enabled gaming. An impressive achievement that makes us wonder how AMD’s FSR fares in this regard since it’s a more open and hardware-agnostic solution.
While Nvidia didn’t give much detail about how it obtained this percentage, it’s not surprising. From the looks of it, anyone who has tried DLSS at least once counts. And since many gamers play more than one title, chances are at least one required a little frame rate kick, courtesy of a good old AI accelerator. Now, imagine if GTX cards also had access to DLSS instead of FSR and XeSS, these figures could be jaw-dropping.
Introduced back in 2018 alongside the RTX 20 Series, DLSS didn’t stop evolving. From a slow start that required per-game AI training to difficulties convincing developers to adopt it, not to forget gamers’ reluctance to use it, DLSS has come a long way to reach its current state. At the time of writing, it’s available in more than 540 games and apps – including 15 out of 20 top 2024 games according to Nvidia. DLSS has become unavoidable.
Its latest version, DLSS 4 takes Nvidia’s ambition even further by fine-tuning the upscaling quality, stability, and latency, in addition to a new multi frame generation solution that pushes game smoothness to new heights. These new advancements are possible thanks to a completely new neural architecture for the first time since DLSS 2.
And these are only the ones directly related to DLSS. Another feature courtesy of a revamped display engine is what Nvidia calls flip metering. This technology should help the GPU deliver consistent and optimal frame pacing, making games feel smoother by reducing the judder caused by inconsistent frame timing.
Needless to say, DLSS – and upscaling in general – is here to stay. And with the improvements we see each passing generation, we don’t mind it that much if it doesn’t effect true game optimisation. The next step is pushing frame generation to the same level as DLSS upscaling to make having 15 out of 16 AI-generated pixels acceptable.
