Every week, we bring you news of the latest DLSS and ray tracing integrations in games and apps. This week, Jagged Alliance 3 and Testament: The Order of High Human launch with support for DLSS 2; SlavicPunk: Oldtimer and DESORDRE: A Puzzle Game Adventure are available now with DLSS 2, and Dying Light 2 Stay Human's Good Night, Good Luck update is available with DLSS 3. To cap it all off, Blizzard has announced the details of Diablo IV's Season of the Malignant! Read on to learn more.

Diablo IV: Season of the Malignant Starts July 20th
Get ready to continue your journey through Sanctuary in Diablo IV with Season of the Malignant on July 20th. A new form of Lilith's corruption has spread throughout Sanctuary, creating Malignant Monsters and opportunities for players to create powerful new builds. Partner with Cormond, a former priest of the Cathedral of Light, in a new questline to stop the spread of these Malignant Monsters, collect new items and earn rewards.

Each week, we're bringing you news of the latest DLSS and ray tracing integrations in games and apps. Last week, Diablo IV launched with DLSS 3, Tower of Fantasy added DLSS 3 in a new game update, and it was announced that Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart will launch with DLSS 3, ray tracing, Reflex and DLAA on July 26th.

This week, F1 23 races off the line with support for DLSS 2, Reflex and ray tracing, and both Daydream: Forgotten Sorrow and Layers of Fear are launching with DLSS 2. Additionally, we've got a first look at Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, enhanced with the Technology Preview of the Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode, along with new trailers for upcoming DLSS-enhanced games.

Developer Sweet Bandits Studios and Publisher Tripwire Presents announced that DECEIVE INC., the highly-anticipated multiplayer FPS title that blends stealth and spycraft elements with intense action, launches this week with cross-play support on PC (via Steam and Epic Games Store), the PlayStation 5 computer entertainment system, and Xbox Series X|S console system.

DECEIVE INC. deploys players into the world of high-stakes subterfuge, working for a private corporation with a complete monopoly over the international espionage market. Disguise yourself as anyone you meet in an instant, access state-of-the-art gadgets the rest of the world can only dream of, and possess skills that would make Hollywood super spies jealous. But you are not alone. Rival spies are after the same objective and every single one of them is as skilled, cunning, and well-equipped as you are. Blend in, alone or with your team, grab the objective, and break out. In the end, only the right actions and skills will get you that paycheck.

CD Projekt RED announced an unexpected content update for the now-7 year old "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt," an immensely popular AAA game that continues to be a favorite among GPU reviewers and PC enthusiasts. The content update, dubbed simply "Next Gen Update," is expected to go live on December 14, 2022. The free update adds several visual enhancements that would normally be marketed as a "Remastered" title, and sold separately.

To begin with, CDPR has increased texture resolutions, and redesigned the foliage to be more realistic. It gets new real-time ray traced global illumination (RT-GI), which should significantly improve the lighting throughout the game. The game also gets super-sampling performance enhancements, namely NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR 2. Thanks to the higher-resolution assets and RT-GI, the graphics settings now include a new preset called "Ultra+," which maxes out everything, including the new assets. The game's UI now offers more camera perspectives. For next-generation consoles, the update adds a new "Performance" mode that runs it at 60 FPS, and a new "Quality" mode that enables RT-GI along with FSR 2.The trailer for the new content update follows.

Intel XeSS is a second-generation upscaling technology that's at par with DLSS 2.0 and FSR 2.0, says Digital Foundry, which got an exclusive early-access an Arc A770 graphics card along with XeSS, and the latest version of "Shadow of the Tomb Raider," which features XeSS besides DLSS. The publication compared the A770 + XeSS with a GeForce RTX 3070 + DLSS, and in its testing, found XeSS to offer comparable or better image quality at low frame-times. XeSS uses a AI-ML algorithm to reconstruct details, which is accelerated by the XMX cores on Xe-HPG "Alchemist" GPUs. XeSS hence currently only supports Arc GPUs, however, the company is working on a DP4a (programming model) version so XeSS could work on other GPU architectures, across brands.

An upscaling algorithm by design adds to frame-times (time taken to render a frame to display), and in Digital Foundry's testing, the most aggressive preset of XeSS, Performance, which upscales 720p to 1440p, adds 2 ms to the frame-time. A 1080p to 4K upscaling in the same mode, adds 3.4 ms to the frame-time, which jumps from 8.8 ms to 12.2 ms (an increase of 3.4 ms). The increase in frame-times is a good trade-off when you consider the performance gained—a staggering 88 percent increase in frame-rates for 1080p to 4K upscaling, and 52 percent increase with 720p to 1440p upscaling. Frame-times increase as you move up the presets toward the Quality mode, which renders the game at resolutions closer to native-resolution, so the performance-gained is smaller. XeSS offers a preset it calls "Ultra Quality," which renders the game at a resolution closest to native, while still yielding a 16-23 percent frame-rate gain, with an output that's practically indistinguishable from native-resolution.

Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the highest-rated games of all time, with over 275 perfect scores and over 175 Game of the Year Awards. Its PC release is also one of the platform's best-looking titles, with an amazingly rendered and realistic open world that tests the mettle of any PC when effects and rendering resolutions are ramped up.

To boost performance on GeForce RTX PCs and laptops, Rockstar has today released a NVIDIA DLSS update for Red Dead Redemption 2 and Red Dead Online. If you're unfamiliar with NVIDIA DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), it's a groundbreaking AI rendering technology that increases graphics performance using dedicated Tensor Core AI processors on GeForce RTX GPUs, without compromising image quality.

NVIDIA is reportedly about to make some big announcements related to its DLSS 2.0 performance enhancement feature. Excepts from the announcement we leaked to the web by VideoCardz. To begin with, the company is about to announce that both the upcoming Unreal Engine 5, and the current UE 4, support DLSS 2.0, besides the latest version 2021.2 of the Unity Engine. A large number of first-party game engines now support DLSS 2.0, including notably, the Rockstar Games RAGE engine powering RDR2, CryEngine, Decima, AnvilNext, REDEngine, and more.

NVIDIA is also preparing to announce that a vast new selection of games support DLSS 2.0, including Red Dead Redemption 2 (support coming soon), Rainbow Six Siege, DOOM Eternal (patch scheduled for June 29), Rust, and more. Lastly, NVIDIA is about to announce that it is working with Valve to bring DLSS support to Linux, via Proton compatibility layer. This will enable playing AAA Windows games on Linux with DLSS enabled.

As AMD's upcoming feature that rivals NVIDIA DLSS nears release, reportedly this June, a USPTO patent application sheds some light on its inner workings. In its November 2019 application, AMD describes the feature as "Gaming Super Resolution." The abstract points to what the feature essentially does—downscaling or upscaling images using various methods, with the goal of improving performance, without much loss in fidelity. "The present application provides devices and methods for efficiently super-resolving an image, which preserves the original information of the image while upscaling the image and improving fidelity. The devices and methods utilize linear and non-linear up-sampling in a wholly learned environment," the application reads.

The application emphasizes on using a combination of linear and non-linear upscaling methods to improve the fidelity of the lower-resolution render output to the user's display resolution, including leveraging a "wholly learned" AI deep-learning network. This would be a DNN that relies on ground-truth information to reconstruct some fidelity to the upscaled image. "The devices and methods include a gaming super resolution (GSR) network architecture which efficiently super resolves images in a convolutional and generalizable manner."

We are hosting the NVIDIA "Attic" RTX + DLSS interactive tech-demo in our Downloads section. Developed on Unreal Engine 4, the demo puts you in the bunny-slippers of a little girl playing around in her attic. This is no normal attic, it's her kingdom, complete with stuff to build a pillow fort, an old CRT TV playing retro NVIDIA commercials, a full-length mirror, really cool old stuff, and decorations. You can explore the place in a first-person perspective.

The interactive demo is brought to life with on-the-fly controls for RTX real-time raytracing and its various features, DLSS performance enhancement, a frame-rate counter, and controls for time-of-day, which alters lighting in the room. The demo shows off raytraced reflections, translucency, global-illumination, direct-illumination, and DLSS. You also get cool gadgets such as the "light cannon" or a reflective orb, that let you play around with dynamic lighting some more. To use this demo, you'll need a machine with an RTX 20-series "Turing" or RTX 30-series "Ampere" graphics card, and Windows 10. The demo also works on Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs. Grab it from the link below.

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA Unreal Engine 4 RTX & DLSS Demo

Nintendo is reportedly preparing to unveil an updated Nintendo Switch console later this year featuring a larger Samsung OLED display. The upcoming model is rumored to feature a 7-inch 720p rigid OLED screen from Samsung Display Co with an initial monthly production target of just under one million units. The screen would be significantly larger than the 6.2-inch screen currently found on the Switch, if Nintendo is to keep the same form-factor the bezels will be significantly thinner. The new model is also likely to feature an upgraded NVIDIA Tegra chip with support for 4K DLSS 2.0 when docked, this will introduce further difficulty for developers who have struggled with the difference between resolutions.

When NVIDIA launched the second iteration of its Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technique used to upscale lower resolutions using deep learning, everyone was impressed by the quality of the rendering it is putting out. However, have you ever wondered how it all looks from the developer side of things? Usually, games need millions of lines of code and even some small features are not so easy to implement. Today, thanks to Tom Looman, a game developer working with Unreal Engine, we have found out just how the integration process of DLSS 2.0 looks like, and how big are the performance benefits coming from it.

Inthe blog post, you can take a look at the example game shown by the developer. The integration with Unreal Engine 4.26 is easy, as it just requires that you compile your project with a special UE4 RTX branch, and you need to apply your AppID which you can apply for at NVIDIA's website. Right now you are probably wondering how is performance looking like. Well, the baseline for the result was TXAA sampling techniques used in the game demo. The DLSS 2.0 has managed to bring anywhere from 60-180% increase in frame rate, depending on the scene. These are rather impressive numbers and it goes to show just how well NVIDIA has managed to build its DLSS 2.0 technology. For a full overview, please refer to the blog post.

Ahead of its PC platform release on July 14, testing of a pre-release build by Tom's Hardware reveals that "Death Stranding" will offer 4K 60 frames per second on any NVIDIA RTX 20-series graphics card if DLSS 2.0 is enabled. NVIDIA's performance-enhancing feature renders the game at a resolution lower than that of the display head, and uses AI to reconstruct details. We've detailed DLSS 2.0 in an older article. The PC version has a frame-rate limit of 240 FPS, ultra-wide resolution support, and a photo mode (unsure if it's an Ansel implementation). It has rather relaxed recommended system requirements for 1080p 60 FPS gaming (sans DLSS).

CD Projekt Red has released their latest trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 showcasing the spectacular visuals for the upcoming action-adventure-RPG. NVIDIA has confirmed that the trailer included Ray-Traced Diffuse Illumination, Ray-Traced Reflections, Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion, and Ray-Traced Shadows real-time ray-tracing effects. These effects are powered by the DirectX 12 Ultimate's DXR Raytracing API and are optimized for GeForce RTX graphics GPUs.

NVIDIA also announced that the game would feature DLSS 2.0 tech which uses custom deep learning neural networks to boost game FPS. When Cyberpunk 2077 launches later this year, it will be available on GeForce NOW, with full support for ray-tracing effects and DLSS 2.0 at 1080p 60 FPS.

NVIDIA's game streaming service GeForce NOW has gained support for NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) 2.0 in the latest update. DLSS 2.0 uses the tensor cores found in RTX series graphics cards to render games at a lower resolution and then use custom AI to construct sharp, higher resolution images. The introduction of DLSS 2.0 to GeForce NOW should allow for graphics quality to be improved on existing server hardware and deliver a smoother stutter-free gaming experience. NVIDIA announced that Control would be the first game on the platform to support DLSS 2.0, with additional games such as MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries and Deliver Us The Moon to support the feature in the future.

NVIDIA today announced its new Deep Learning Supersampling 2.0 (DLSS 2.0) performance enhancement feature, being distributed through the new GeForce 445.75 Game Ready drivers. DLSS 2.0 is NVIDIA's second attempt at a holy grail of performance boost at acceptable levels of quality loss (think what MP3 did to WAV). It works by rendering the 3D scene at a lower resolution than what your display is capable of, and upscaling it with deep-learning reconstructing details using a pre-trained neural network. Perhaps the two biggest differences between DLSS 2.0 and the original DLSS that made its debut with GeForce RTX 20-series in 2018, is the lack of a need for game-specific content for training the DLSS neural net; and implementation of a rendering technique called temporal feedback.

As mentioned earlier, DLSS 2.0 offers image quality comparable to original resolution while only rendering 1/4 or1/2 the pixels. It then uses new temporal feedback techniques to reconstruct details in the image. DLSS 2.0 is also able to use tensor cores on GeForce RTX GPUs "more efficiently," to execute "2x faster" than the original DLSS. Lastly, DLSS 2.0 gives users greater control over the image quality, which affects the rendering resolution of your game: quality, balanced (1:2), and performance (1:4), where the ratio denotes rendering-resolution to display resolution. Resolution scaling is a sure-shot way to gain performance, but at noticeable quality loss. DLSS uses AI to restore some of the details. The difference between performance gained from resolution scaling and AI-based image quality enhancement is the net DLSS performance uplift. In addition to DLSS 2.0, GeForce 445.75 drivers come game-ready for "Half Life: Alyx."

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 445.75 Game Ready Drivers with DLSS 2.0