Why is this important: Nvidia revealed this week that its Game Ready driver for January 14 will bring a new feature to RTX graphics cards that improves the company’s Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR) feature, thus improving picture quality without the same performance.
Dynamic Super Resolution is Nvidia’s method for allowing users to easily down-sample games. It renders a game at a higher resolution and then downscales it to your monitor’s native resolution. This results in extremely efficient anti-aliasing, but only works well if a GPU has the extra power to run at that higher resolution. This is a good way to make older games with outdated anti-aliasing technology cleaner.
Deep Learning Dynamic Super Resolution (DLDSR) uses Tensor cores from RTX graphics cards to make this process more efficient. Nvidia’s announcement complaints Using DLDSR to play a game at 2.25x, the output resolution looks as good as using DSR at 4x the resolution, but achieves the same frame rate as a 1x resolution.
Nvidia demonstrates this with Bethesda and Arkane’s 2017 Prey, first using DSR to downsample from 4K to 1080p, then using DLDSR to downsample from 1620p to 1080p. 4K and 1620p screenshots look the same, but the 1620p one has a 40fps advantage, reaching almost the same frame rate as the original 1080p image.
Unlike DLSS which developers must implement manually in every game, DLDSR will work in most games. The feature should appear in the Nvidia Control Panel as an option in Manage 3D Settings> DSR Factors.
Nvidia also announced that it has worked with acclaimed ReShade author Pascal Gilcher to create new filters for Freestyle, an Nvidia feature that can change the look of a game in real time. One of them is a modified version of Gilcher’s Ray Tracing Reshade Filter.
This driver update is the same one that will include the drivers for the PC version of God of War, which will also be released on January 14.