Image Credit: NVIDIA
What is DLSS 3?
Exclusively available with 40 series graphics cards, DLSS 3.0 is a clever software solution to speed up your framerate using upscaling and AI generated frames, offering your shiny, powerful new NVIDIA GPU hardware a shrewd software partner to boost its performance.
This partnership of brawn and brains isn't new to NVIDIA, as the 3.0 in "DLSS 3.0" suggests, we've already had DLSS and DLSS 2 with previous iterations of GeForce cards, however the previous versions only performed the upscaling task, the AI powered graphics bit is very new indeed, and this is where we get to see some generational gains in performance.
Naturally, the gains will be more noticeable when your GPU has serious work to do, and as the latest & greatest, 40-series GPUs are likely to perform well in most games currently anyway, so cranking the resolution up to 4K is where you'll really see the difference.
What do we mean by upscaling?
The upscaling portion of what DLSS does is to render frames at a lower resolution and then 'upscale' them to meet the settings you're actually playing the game at - this improves your framerate significantly, and you don't actually see any decrease in visual fidelity, so there's no downside.
And what about that AI generating frames stuff?
DLSS 3.0 can now create entire new frames itself, using AI to predict what the next frame should look like and just popping it in there so the GPU doesn't need to render it. Rendering frames is a lot more demanding on your hardware than AI-generating them, so when your GPU doesn't need to render every single one there's a significant upside in framerate.
If you want to read more about NVIDIA's Ada Lovelace technology and DLSS 3, check out our other article here: Ada Lovelace Architecture Explained - What's New?
What games are available for DLSS 3?
As a new technology DLSS 3.0 is not yet widely supported, there are just short of 20 games at the time of writing that you can play with DLSS 3.0 enabled, however more titles are in the pipeline, and as DLSS 3.0 is supported by both Unreal 4 and 5, Frostbite and Unity engines it's reasonable to expect plenty more as time progresses.
NVIDIA's latest list of DLSS 3 enabled and upcoming titles are all included in the list below, correct as of time of writing.
DLSS 3 Games: Playable Now*
- A Plague Tale: Requiem
- Bright Memory: Infinite
- Dakar Desert Rally
- Destroy All Humans! 2 - Reprobed
- F1 22
- FIST: Forged In Shadow Torch
- Jurassic World Evolution 2
- Justice
- Loopmancer
- Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales
- Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered
- Microsoft Flight Simulator
- Need For Speed Unbound
- Portal with RTX
- Super People
- The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt - Game of the Year Edition
- Warhammer 40,000: Darktide
- WRC Generations
DLSS 3 Games: Coming Soon* (awaiting patch or release)
- Atomic Heart
- Black Myth: Wukong
- Chernobylite
- Conqueror's Blade
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Deliver Us Mars
- Dying Light 2
- Hitman 3
- Hogwarts Legacy
- Icarus
- Marauders
- Marvel's Midnight Suns
- Midnight Ghost Hunt
- Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord
- Naraka: Bladepoint
- Perish
- Ripout
- STALKER 2: Heart of Chornobyl
- Scathe
- Sword and Fairy 7
- Synced
- The Day Before
- The Lord of the Rings: Gollum
- Throne and Liberty
- Tower of Fantasy
- Warhaven
- Witchfire
*Correct at time of writing.
