ELI5: What is DLSS?

[u/andromedanpixels]

I've seen people use it for work that's done using computer graphics and 3D but I don't know what that is other than it is neccesary to get an NVIDIA graphic card to plug that into your computer

[u/_Rand_]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Learning_Super_Sampling

tldr: its a series of techniques to increase graphical performance/quality without massive computational power so you can game better without a top end card.

[u/camdenpike → u/_Rand_]

I would say performance more than quality, as artifacts are often introduced in order to kind of "fake" a higher quality setting such as resolution. DLSS 5 though, kind of turns this idea on it's head, really the first time it's trying to actually improve quality of the lighting, but it's extremely compute intensive.

[u/cha0ss0ldier → u/camdenpike]

Newer dlss models on DLSS Quality look better than native in most games, mostly because it handles AA much better than TAA and looks a lot cleaner/less blurry.

4k DLSS Quality is some black magic

[u/djddanman]

DLSS stands for "deep learning super sampling". It uses machine learning to upscale an image, like a frame of a video game. So your computer can render faster at a lower resolution then increase the resolution before sending it to the monitor.

[u/veksr]

Let's the gpu render image at lower resolution than native which results in better performance. Mostly used in games, no clue how that works in professional applications.

[u/bothunter → u/veksr]

Enhance!

[u/Modern_Pirate9]

Super clever upscaling. Where for example a game can render at 1080p but shows it at 4K. So your PC only needs to render 2M pixels, and show 7.4M pixels, meaning that you can use less powerful hardware. The first real version (2.0) was okay, but it's gone through a few revisions (including a major one last year), and it's now very good.

[u/Mountain_Candle7626]

DLSS means Deep Learning Super Sampling.

Your GPU loads game at low resolution like instead of 4K it loads in 1080p. Due to low resolution GPU have to do less work on each frame hence it can generate more frames so game feels more smooth.

Now AI adds more pixels to each frame so it becomes like 4K.

With help of DLSS we can get more FPS without losing quality.

Nvidia GPU have special Tensor cores. These are specifically designed to run heavy artificial intelligence calculations super fast in real time.

[u/smokeplants]

Okay so you know how the screen is made of little dots? Each of those "pixels" needs to be processed by the graphics card for each frame. At lower resolutions, less pixels, higher resolutions like 4k can have drastically more pixels, resulting in a higher performance cost for every frame. By choosing to start with a lower resolution image and less pixels, the graphics card in the computer can do less work. However if we stopped here there would be less detail. So the card uses some special trickery to calculate what the image should look like in a higher resolution, and fills in the rest of the pixels. If you do this every frame to increase your final resolution, that is the type of upscaling DLSS is doing.

[u/Kamakaziturtle]

As a note too, AMD has their own version called FSR

[u/hangender]

Basically, it's AI slop.

But it's the good kind of AI slop.

DLSS 5 remains to be judged.

[u/hereforthefeast → u/[deleted]]

That’s MFG. 

DLSS is not quite the same as rendering artificial frames. All the frames are still rendered (instead of generated via AI) but are then upscaled in resolution.