Fake Frames or Big Gains? - Nvidia DLSS 3 Analyzed

foreign [Music] welcome back to Hardware unboxed a couple of days ago Steve published his big Benchmark Review covering the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 and boy is this thing a mighty impressive GPU from a performance standpoint but the one thing he didn't get into much detail on was dlss3 one of the new selling points of nvidia's Ada Lovelace generation Nvidia has made some pretty bold claims around dlss3 including its supposed ability to Triple or even quadruple performance in conjunction with the 4090 relative to older ampere graphics cards so there's certainly a bit of hype and expectation here today's video is sponsored by epic games and PC Building Simulator 2 which is out now on the epic game store PC Building Simulator 2 is a major overhaul on the cult hit original bringing new features like a campaign mode with 30 plus hours of gameplay and over 1200 PC parts for your virtual builds including licensed Hardware from Brands like AMD Intel and Nvidia players will be able to enjoy a suite of new Enthusiast features like thermal imaging power monitoring custom water blocks and revamped thermal paste tools with more features and parts to be added in post-launch updates I quite enjoyed the original and let me tell you this new version is quite a bit better in terms of gameplay and Graphics so click the link in the description below to grab PC Building Simulator 2 on the epic game store now however on the flip side I've seen DLS S3 described by several commenters as a fake frame generator or some variation on that the thinking here being that DLS S3 doesn't actually generate what we would typically class as a frame while gaming or at least a real frame so we'll explore both sides to that story to see exactly where this new technology sits and whether it's a selling point for nvidia's rtx40 series firstly what is dlss3 well by now most GPU owners would be familiar with dlss2 the technology that renders a game at a lower resolution then upscales to a higher resolution using temporal information motion vectors and an AI super resolution model DSS2 has been an excellent technology for gamers in that it delivers more performance than native resolution gaming at only a minor hit to visual quality especially using the highest quality presets dss3 takes this idea one step further by generating entirely new frames to slot between traditionally rendered frames with dlss2 at least some portion of each frame shown was actually rendered by the game engine in some capacity but with dealer says 3 and its frame generation feature Nvidia gpus have the ability to create frames without any traditional rendering taking place this is achieved through the combination of motion vectors which show where and how elements on screen are moving between frames and Optical flow a technique used to blend and interpolate between two images the resulting generated frames are essentially an estimation of what dlss3 thinks the game would have rendered between each frame the performance benefits of dlss3 and we need to be careful using the term performance with this feature as I'll talk about later come from the GPU still being able to run at full power to render normal frames with the dlss3 algorithm generating more at a minimal performance overhead this is why Nvidia are able to claim large frame rate increases using this technology but generating frames this way throws up a lot of questions what is the visual quality like of each frame that's being fully generated by an algorithm if dlss3 is generating frames between each normal frame how does this impact latency what are the limitations of using this technology all that and more will be answered in this video before diving into some visual comparisons I just wanted to briefly touch on the challenges of testing dlss3 right now currently we only have access to the RTX 4090 and dss3 is exclusive to new RTX 40 series gpus this means that often dlss3 will push frame rates into the hundreds way more than this mere 60fps video this presents an immediate issue of how do you show the visual quality of dlss3 when showing 120 plus FPS gameplay at 60fps we'll see many frames cut from the footage what if those frames being cut other generated frames then effectively you aren't actually seeing what DLS S3 is doing to visuals this is something that is going to be an issue across all captures of dss3 gameplay which is why I think you need to be wary of simple 60fps reposts of dss3 footage so how are we approaching this well in today's video you're going to see a mixture of techniques to illustrate what dlss3 looks like in motion at times we'll be playing High frame rate footage straight back at 60 FPS but at other times we'll be slowing down the footage to highlight certain areas of the visuals but only in situations where what we are showing is visible in real time and we'll discuss that as we go we're also at times going to Simply limit dlss3 to a much lower frame rate using a few tricks so we can see how the algorithm fares on theoretical future gpus that aren't nearly as fast as the 4090 it's also difficult to capture 4K 120 FPS gameplay as today's capture cards don't support this and we typically rely on external captures for these sorts of videos however for dlss3 we're almost forced into using local capture using invinc to get footage at a high frame rate which is what we've done our test system today is using of course the GeForce RTX 4090 Founders Edition paired with a ryzen 9 5950x and 32 gigabytes of ddr4 3200 memory there are a number of resources in video provided to look at dlss3 but we're sticking to the real world game examples primarily of three games cyberpunk 2077 Microsoft flight simulator and f122 the implementation of dlss3 across these games is quite janky in the pre-release beta versions We were provided but each developer promises the issues will be ironed out by launch and in some instances I believe it could be several weeks until the DLS S3 patch for the game goes live before trying to break dlss3 with tricky test conditions I wanted to show the typical gaming experience that you'll see reasonably often here's cyberpunk 2077 with dlss quality mode on one side and dlss quality mode plus frame generation AKA dlss3 on the other side when driving along this highway in a predictable standard fashion as you would in a game there's not a huge difference between each image whether you're playing the game or watching this footage in real time it's quite hard to spot the differences at 4K which is good news for DLS S3's frame generation technology on closer inspection of course as expected the drss3 image is more prone to artifacts and issues and generally has a slightly softer and blurrier look overall more akin to dss2's Performance mode than quality mode the most common issue with DLS S3 in motion is slight sizzling and flickering of moving objects one frame the normally rendered frame will be of high quality the next frame will be a generated frame with unstable edges ghosting and issues however at high frame rates this can be pretty hard to spot we were just playing back footage at real time but how about half rate roughly 50 FPS Can you spot the issues what about now at 25 playback speed nope can't see them still what about at 12.5 speed it's easier to spot the artifacts every second frame now but when we're talking about around 100 FPS footage each of these dodgy frames is only being shown for 10 milliseconds with good quality frames in between when only small portions of the screen have issues gameplay is relatively consistent with only small to moderate changes in each frame this sizzling and artifacting is must to some degree let's show another example in cyberpunk 2077. in this scene I spotted a fair bit of ghosting with each image but that was present regardless of whether DLS S3 was used or not it's an issue with dss2's reconstruction in this scene I'm not equalizing frame rate so the dlss quality site is running at about 50 to 60 FPS while the dlss3 image is about 80 to 90 FPS when we focus our attention on the street lights and overhead power wires both sides have their share of issues with image stability but in this scene even looking at real-time footage the dss3 image is clearly less stable in motion with more artifacts and more flickering it's only for some areas of the screen though it's not like the entire presentation turns terrible with frame generation enabled it's only parts of the screen which you may find hard to notice depending on how sensitive you are to these issues we're slowing down the footage it does become more apparent which frames are the normally rendered frames and which are the generated frames and it's apparent here with a less aggressive slowdown because the frame rate is lower previously when looking at 100 plus FPS footage each generated frame was being shown for less than 10 milliseconds but with this 80 FPS footage we're up to 12.5 milliseconds per frame which doesn't sound like a big difference but does impact the visibility of artifacts another example this time f122 captured at 120 FPS for both dlss quality and dlss quality plus frame generation slowed down to 60 FPS so we're not discarding every second frame even under these slow motion conditions when just playing the game under regular race circumstances it's pretty hard to tell the difference between frame generation on or off this sort of frame rate each generated frame is only on screen for eight milliseconds or thereabouts interlaced with higher quality frames in real time or even half rate playback the dss3 image looks pretty good with only a small drop to image quality visible at times another example is flight simulator and we're inside the cockpit of an aircraft here we'll also find Details smaller knobs bigger knobs even a few large shafts to look at we're moving the camera around the cockpit as you would play in the game the oss3 handled this pretty well with a final frame rate of around 120 FPS I wasn't really able to notice the artifacts in practice so while there is a small quality difference between dlaa and dlss frame generation in this sort of very slow paced Simulator game and even when moving the camera around like this it wasn't much of an issue for dlss3 even Landing planes using the external view there's not much motion here each frame is relatively consistent ideal conditions for dss3 and this is the majority of the game so it holds up really well here you'll have to excuse my flying I'm an absolutely atrocious pilot using keyboard and mouse controls so when talking about DLS S3's image quality and the best case more typical usage scenarios there are a few common themes if the final frame rate of the scene is above about 100 to 120 FPS each generated frame is only shown on screen for a short time making any artifacts hard to spot the higher the frame rate the less noticeable artifacts are as this Frame time gets shorter and shorter with more real rendered frames interlaced into the presentation DLS S3 also benefits from consistency and a lack of motion slower paced games like flight simulator are a great use case but even driving around in cyberpunk provided what you're doing is pretty standard consistent type stuff then the frame generation and particularly the optical flow algorithm doesn't have to do all that much while DLS S3 typically doesn't look as good as DLS s2's quality or even performance modes if these conditions are met the image quality is definitely usable on many occasions however and this is a big however there were several instances where I was able to really expose the flaws with dlss3 and this was much easier to do than with dlss2 as an example dls2 does have its share of problems in motion we've talked about ghosting aliasing flickering at times in the past but usually you'd have to be zooming in footage and viewing fine detail to spot the changes at times dlss2 was also capable of improving image quality relative to weak native presentations using crappy TAA and with the performance benefit as well it was usually an obvious choice to enable it at least on the quality setting with DLS S3 there are no situations where I would describe the images better than native and when you see artifacts with frame generation enabled they are much more noticeable than with dlss 2's fine detail issues the biggest and most noticeable problems with DLS S3 concern the UI or UI elements within a game frame generation appears to reconstruct the entire image and this appears to include the UI with lots of text Vector type images or big uniform areas of color UI issues are very noticeable much more so than with regular in-game imagery like roads or leaves take flight simulator as an example while moving around the cockpit it looks just fine for the actual cockpit elements the UI text showing a waypoint is completely garbled when frame generation is used there is a lot of flickering and instability with this as we Pan the camera and it doesn't even take rapid movements to expose the floor I was easily able to spot this with the frame rate around 120 FPS so even though each generated image is being shown on screen for a relatively short period the constant flickering of this type was distracting and looked horrible when slowing the footage down you can clearly spot which frames are real and which are generated with the generated frames really not having much idea of what to do in reconstructing that particular UI element this is also the case in f122 at any frame rate above each competitor you'll see the names and place of that driver but during standard Motion in a race these labels can easily get garbled as frame generation struggles to figure out what to do with these elements it seems clear to me that the U UI should be rendered into the image after frame generation is applied but whether this is possible given how dlss3 works I'm not sure the second issue is when you change camera perspectives or angles within a game for a brief moment again dss3 really doesn't know how to handle the image and what you end up with is a really terrible frame on screen for a split second this is how f122 handles that transition you get this big blurry mess as frame generation tries to interpolate between two very different frames it can be hard to notice this at high frame rates but it's questionable as to whether showing this frame has any benefit whatsoever when it doesn't really look like a normal real frame and this crops up across many scenarios if you stop and scrutinize the frames that dlss3 actually generates it's not a pretty picture at times huge areas of blur elements being Blended together repeated sections of frames low detail level obviously this is an unrealistic situation because in a game you're not stopping to view each individual frame but the goal with dss3 is to basically hide these frames between the real rendered frames and fake its way up to a higher level of smoothness provided the frame rate is high enough and each of these dodgy generated frames is shown only for a short enough time you'll probably not notice what is going on and that's true it can genuinely be hard to spot all of these issues that can appear so glaring when you view the individual generated frames but there are situations where you can only do so much to hide the floors the big problem with dlss3 in this sense is when you are using frame generation at a low frame rate which may be the case on future lower end RTX 40 series gpus we power limited the 4090 to simulate a much slower GPU that may only be capable of rendering games with gls2 enabled at around 30 to 40 FPS with heavy Ray tracing effects enabled then when turning on dlss3 frame generation we can try and get this frame rate more up in the 60 to 70 FPS range this is very likely to be something that users may consider with a card like an RTX 4050 or RTX 4060 the problem with using dlss3 at around a final frame rate of 60 FPS is that it no longer hides the artifacts here we have flight simulator running at just above 60 FPS with frame generation enabled when panning around this Airbus A320 from the exterior you can easily see instability around the edges of the aircraft particularly the vertical stabilizer on the rear these artifacts flicker noticeably and almost look like there's an issue with display corruption but that's not the case it's dlss3 in this other scene you can see similar issues with artifacts in motion when the final frame rate is around that 60 FPS Mark here in cyberpunk 2077 we're running again around 60fps with frame generation on and while jumping in this scene you can see clear sizzling and artifacting around some on-screen elements in motion it's more noticeable at slower playback speeds but is still clearly visible in real time and contrast to the dss-2 image at the same frame rate which doesn't have these issues here's another example in cyberpunk showing issues with the dss3 image that are noticeable at lower frame rates this makes Delia says 3 unsuitable and basically unusable as a tool to Target 60fps if your GPU isn't powerful enough to render at this frame rate natively in fact you'll likely see issues with the presentation at any Target frame rate below 100 to 120 FPS based on my experience with the technology so far this means the GPU must be capable of rendering at least with dlss2 enabled somewhere in the 60 to 80 FPS range before enabling dlss3 and to avoid UI artifacts you'll need to aim higher even a baseline of say 100 to 120 FPS with a final frame rate near 200 FPS it's abundantly clear that dss3 only shines from a visual standpoint at high frame rates the other issue with dlss3 is latency dlss3 frame generation increases input latency compared to not using the feature even if it increases the frame rate what this creates is a weird situation where frame rate increases but latency increases as well usually when gaming higher frame rates lead to lower latency and therefore a more responsive experience but this isn't the case with dlss3 which means that at times enabling dlss3 can make a game feel more sluggish even if the frame rate has risen a weird feeling for sure first off we have cyberpunk 2077 these latency numbers were measured as click to Photon latency using nvidia's ldot tool which allows us to record the total latency from when you click to when you see the action appear on screen this is the most accurate way to test latency and gives the most real world results the results are super interesting when enabling dlss quality mode we see what normally happens when a frame rates increase and this is something we've covered on the channel previously in the area we tested seeing FPS rows from 42 to 70 to FPS and that came with a decrease in latency from 64 to 47 milliseconds the game feels faster as you'd expect but when enabling frame generation while seeing FPS rose again to 112 FPS latency increased to 63 milliseconds what this means is that despite the game having the visual smoothness of 112 FPS the latency and responsiveness you're experiencing is more like playing the game at 40 FPS you end up with smooth motion but a slow feel which is really hard to show on camera in contrast if we use DSS performance mode to raise performance further instead we end up running at a lesser frame rate but with noticeably better latency and this plays out as a more responsive gaming experience enabling frame generation here sees latency rise as well but at least latency is now lower than native rendering the reason why we're seeing these results and why there's a stark discrepancy between nvidia's own numbers is we tested dlss2 and Native performance with reflex enabled after all if reflex is available why would you disable it it also equalizes the playing field between dlss3 which forces Reflex on and the other rendering methods so with frame generation is the only variable we clearly produce higher latency but when compared to the reflex off numbers suddenly frame generation looks pretty good we go from 102 milliseconds at Native rendering to 63 milliseconds with dlss3 it's just that no one would consider playing with reflex off so it's an unrealistic test condition this holds true for the other games we tested in Microsoft flight simulator we measured the latency of changing cameras from the cockpit to exterior camera the game is CPU limited heavily so there's no difference in performance between native TAA and dlss and only slight Improvement to latency when using dlss but when enabling frame generation we see an increase in latency so despite running at Double the frame rate latency is higher by over 10 milliseconds this means responsiveness has gone backwards and is actually worse than running natively luckily in a game like flight simulator latency is not a big issue and the game is playable with DLS S3 on in f122 we saw the same behavior testing the latency of a camera angle change going from native TAA to dlss Quality saw a huge uplift in performance and a corresponding decrease in latency which is what we're used to seeing but enabling frame generation while it did improve performance by nearly 40 FPS it also increased latency by 11 milliseconds in other words while the game is running at 170 FPS you're getting the latency and responsiveness as if the game was being rendered at 100 FPS lower than what we started with when DSS quality mode was being used in this game we can also compare the latency of dlss performance mode to dlss Quality plus frame generation which both ran at roughly the same frame rate despite this using a dlss3 to almost 20 milliseconds of additional latency added which is quite noticeable from this perspective you'd clearly prefer to use dlss performance mode over dlss frame generation as not only does performance mode look better it delivers the same frame rate at lower latency even using frame generation with dlsys performance mode we can't reach the latency of just running with DSS quality mode so while the visual quality of dlss3 may be acceptable in some situations the latency cost is hard to swallow and the resulting experience depends significantly on what level of performance you're coming from at a Target frame rate of 60 FPS dlss3 provides latency similar to running the game at 30 FPS which feels terrible and made titles such as cyberpunk 2077 feel slow and laggy I have serious question marks over the viability of dlss3 for lower end less powerful gpus as a result even gaming with dss3 pumping at 120 FPS in real world latency terms the game felt more like it was being run at 60fps or even less than 60 FPS at times I'm not the most latency sensitive gamer but even I was able to tell the difference I tested 120 FPS with frame generation 120 FPS without frame generation and 60fps without frame generation and the dss3 frame gen results were most like the 60fps normal rendering results which isn't a huge surprise as the latency numbers would suggest that this is the case it was honestly a weird experience playing a game where the smoothness is clearly high but the game still feels slow it's not something you typically experience unless there's something wrong with the game engine and how it handles inputs based on this it's hard to recommend anyone use dlss3 at moderate to low frame rates to avoid any latency issues and effectively playing the game at a lower performance level than you started with you need a high Baseline FPS before enabling frame generation I'd recommend a minimum of 120 FPS before dlss3 targeting around 200 FPS with frame generation enabled in this configuration you'll probably see latency equivalent to playing in the 100 to 120 FPS range but with a high level of smoothness which I feel is acceptable for single player titles where latency isn't a huge issue unfortunately it also means that DLS S3 is functionally useless for competitive games the whole reason to improving frame rates in competitive titles such as fortnite OverWatch CS go those sorts of games is to reduce input latency which makes it easier to track and kill enemies dlss 3 Hertz input latency despite the apparent gain to FPS so it's not suitable for those titles you're better off turning down quality settings or using dlss2 and with the RTX 4090 the performance level is so high in competitive tiles there's no point considering DLS history anyway it's also pointless to use dlss3 when the frame rate exceeds your monitor's maximum refresh rate with normal rendering you can see some benefit running at a higher frame rate than your maximum refresh rate because higher FPS will continue to give you latency benefits dlss3 though doesn't provide that same latency Advantage because High FPS does not come hand in hand with better latency in effect using dlss3 above your maximum refresh rate is doing nothing it's just producing frames you might not fully see and at no benefit to latency with the potential for tearing with the recommendations I've outlined so far this makes dss3 most useful for those with high refresh rate 240Hz monitors or greater if you can start with around 120 FPS gameplay and use DLS S3 to Boost that up near the maximum refresh of your display you'll get a smoother experience with less sample and hold blur in other situations either at lower frame rates or with monitors of a lower refresh rate the benefits to dlss3 are a lot less the final issue to doss3 is it doesn't support frame capsule vsync therefore it's crucial to run DLS S3 on an Adaptive sync display otherwise you'll see ugly tearing as dss3 forces a vsync off State you also can't cap or limit what doss3 produces so a high refresh monitor is required otherwise you run above the maximum refresh potentially and tearing will also then reoccur I hope this is something Nvidia can address in a future revision of DLS S3 because as it stands for many gamers features like frame caps and vsync are essential lastly I just want to talk about the implications of describing what dss3 provides as an increase to Performance across GPU history up to this point when we talk about one product producing higher FPS than another that's directly leading to two benefits smoother visuals and lower latency for more responsive gameplay the two have always gone hand in hand DLS S3 only provides one of the two benefits to higher FPS it does improve smoothness but it doesn't improve latency if you're only getting half of the usual benefit from higher FPS is it fair to say that has improved performance in the same way as other methods I would say that it isn't fair and that dlss 3 frames per second are categorically not equivalent and not comparable to non-dlss three frames per second even without factoring in visual differences they're almost measuring different things this is why in this video we've steered clear of any discussion of raw FPS improvements comparing dlss3 on and off and to other techniques when you add in the visual discrepancies and what dlss3 actually generates in many instances it becomes even harder to compare at this point it's clear that a game running at 120 FPS without DLS S3 frame generation and one at 120 FPS with dlss3 are not equivalent visually this was of course true for dlss2 FSR and other image scaling Technologies as well but the discrepancy in image quality is perhaps largest when comparing generated frames to real frames with DLS S3 this makes any Benchmark chart showing dss3 versus non-dlss3 rendering highly dubious or even misleading Nvidia loves to make those comparisons I just don't think they are valid or Apples to Apples that's not to say doss3 has no benefits it's just that it can't and shouldn't be compared in this way after testing dlss3 across the last week or two I've Come Away with mixed feelings I don't think DLS S3 is the disaster that dlss 1.0 was but it's clear the DLS S3 is providing a narrower set of improvements than dlss2 which is a widely versatile technology that delivers benefits to nearly all GeForce RTX owners dss3 has a more limited set of use cases where Gamers will benefit making it more Niche than the excellent dlss2 deals history will be of benefit to you provided you meet a few criteria one before enabling frame generation you need to already be rendering the game at a decent frame rate in the 100 to 120 FPS range two you'll need to have a high refresh rate display ideally 240Hz or higher and three you'll need to be playing a game that is slower paced and not latency sensitive like a single player title when all of these factors combine and you have the right set of conditions dlss3 does improve the visual smoothness of gameplay and while the quality of generated frames is typically less than that of traditionally rendered frames the way they interlaced into the output makes artifacts hard to notice I think it's best to think of dss3 as a toggle for high refresh rate Gamers to get closer to maxing out their display turn it on and in many cases you can take that 120 FPS level of performance and get near 200 FPS effortlessly leading to better smoothness and less sample and hold motion blur after all monitors perform best when run at as high of a refresh rate as possible with the most frames being fed to it this is a decent step towards making five hundred and one thousand Hertz displays of the future viable rendering at those sorts of frame rates is probably never going to be achievable with the advancements that a lot of game developers are planning but there is a visual benefit from running at such a high refresh rate frame interpolation like dss3 is one technology that could give us that benefit without requiring ridiculous levels of GPU processing Hardware dealer's history was also a real joy to use in Microsoft flight simulator most of the time and I suspect you'll find similar in other games that are not latency sensitive or a CPU limited as dss3 simply generates its own frames without game engine input it can avoid the CPU bottleneck and deliver a smoother experience however there are many limitations to dlss3 the biggest is that it hurts latency when enabled this means that while frame rates go up the game doesn't feel more responsive and in the worst cases will feel more sluggish than with dlss3 disabled a game being run with dual assist 3 at 60fps feels like a 30 FPS game in its responsiveness which is not good at all and makes the technology unsuitable for transforming slower gpus into 60fps performers you get a similar issue with dlss3 at 120 FPS feeling more like 60 FPS despite having the visual Clarity of 120 FPS this is why I suggest users Target rendering at 120 FPS before enabling the technology because at this frame rate you're getting a pretty good level of Baseline latency and any impact from DLS S3 will be minimal especially for single player titles it does however mean that dlc3 is useless for competitive games this history also has some visual issues which are most noticeable at frame rates below 120 FPS the technology does not handle UI elements well and fast motion can cause flickering sizzling blur or ghosting at times the lower the final frame rate the more noticeable these issues will be as each generated frame interlaces between real frames is shown on screen for longer not only does dss3 feel slow at 60fps it also suffers from noticeable artifacts in general the visual quality is lower than that of dlss 2.0 performance mode so if you already find that mode unsatisfactory you won't get a lot out of dlss3 as dss3 provides no latency benefit there's no reason to run it above your monitor's maximum refresh rate you'll be generating frames so basically no gain at all this is why I strongly recommend you have access to a 240Hz display or grader with adaptive sync support there is also no way to cap dss3 inside the maximum refresh rate as both frame limiters and vsync are not supported which is a bummer and I hope it's something Nvidia can resolve this brings me to the major question is dlss3 a selling point for RTX 40 series gpus now as its use cases are more limited I don't think it's as much of a selling point as dlss 2.0 on a powerful GPU like the RTX 4090 there are many cases where you really don't need dlss3 at all because frame rates are already so high and I have question marks over how useful it will be on entry-level products like an RTX 4050 if that ever comes to Market I didn't touch much on dss3 at lower resolutions in this video but I did briefly test at 1080p and 1440p and found all the limitations from the 4K presentation also apply there which again isn't great news for entry level Ada Lovelace I think The Sweet Spot Hardware where buyers will benefit the most will be around RTX 4070 levels of performance where good frame rates are achievable and dss3 can provide a boost into the 200 FPS range but I don't think it's a must-have feature I certainly wouldn't pay a premium to access dss-3 or side grade my GPU for it when upgrading to Ada Lovelace the main benefit is its much higher performance especially for Ray tracing on a product like the RTX 4090 which it as Steve said in his review is really excellent dlss3 it's a nice bonus and adds to the strong feature set of Nvidia gpus that include dlss2 and vanc and reflex together those things are hard to beat but I don't think individually you'd be choosing to spend additional money on dlss3 now to make dealer's history killer feature Nvidia needs to work hard on several areas reducing visual artifacts in generated frames will help the visual experience at more modest frame rates especially if the algorithm can be improved to better handle UI elements adding support for vsync and frame limits is also essential however I'm really not sure whether the main issue of latency can ever be solved given DLS S3 fundamentally needs access to a future frame to slot in its generated frame and clearly the data from the future frame is very important for those generated frames if Nvidia can improve latency that would be amazing and Elevate dlss3 to a killer feature status because you'd be generating frames you'd be improving performance improving smoothness and helping with latency but I wouldn't hold my breath for that to happen anyway that's it for this look at dlss3 across a range of games I am very interested to see your thoughts on dlss3 if you do end up buying an RTX 49 to your other RTX 40 series products and trying it out for yourself unfortunately it's not available on older gpus so it's not something you can sort of demo before getting an RTX 4090 that's because the optical flow generator in older GPU architectures is not fast enough to run deal assist three at least that's the reason that Nvidia gives not sure if that's a legitimate reason or not that's just what they're saying but at least based on my testing you probably wouldn't want to run dls3 anyway at lower frame rates or something like an RTX 2060 would be giving you so yeah I guess that's some something to factor in uh but anyway uh yeah if you're interested in looking at the rest of our RTX 4 Series coverage we do have our 49th year review up on the channel already so go check that out if you want to support our independent testing here at hard run box please do consider subscribing and also supporting us directly via our patreon or floatplane accounts links to those are in the description below where you'll find things like early access to some videos If you go with floatplane we've got our Discord Community if you want to chat about all the latest features and stuff like that so it's been very active with all these releases in the last couple of months so yeah big shout out to our patreon members anyway thanks for watching I'll catch you in the next one [Music] thank you [Music]

Channel: Hardware Unboxed

Views: 682,242

Keywords: hardware unboxed

Id: GkUAGMYg5Lw

Length: 35min 27sec (2127 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 13 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/Zaptruder]

TLDW - DLSS3 best when you have high frame rates and want to max frames for your high refresh monitor.

Better for slower moving single player games, and for games without much UI to focus on (UI/sharp high contrast single color block elements - causes bad frame generation artifacts).

Luckily, most competitive games don't need this tech - those sorts of games tend to be optimized for lower/mid end systems, which cards like this will be complete overkill for... or at least until those games start to offer RT options for visuals...

[u/Aleblanco1987]

ugh, the ui elements need different treatment, it's the most noticiable and looks horrible

[u/GorathOfArdanien]

The marketing of this feature is so annoying, why did they even call it DLSS 3, it's a completely separate almost unrelated feature, and it's just bad in its current form, it's only purpose is to fool people with inflated bajillion FPS numbers.

[u/picosec]

Frame interpolation seems like kind of weird thing for Nvidia to target. Frame extrapolation, like many VR systems use when the application doesn't hit framerate, with updated inputs would probably be more interesting since it can both reduce latency and add more frames. Extrapolation would probably have more visual artifacts since it has less data to work with and the latency reduction would be limited to things like camera movement.

[u/alpharowe3]

In my mind the best purpose of DLSS is to improve performance of lower end cards not necessarily to just blindly push FPS higher on a halo product. So DLSS 3 kind of fucks that idea up. I'm still intrigued by the tech and hope they can fix the latency issue for the sake of the lower end cards.

[u/[deleted]]

And there we go. Gaming at 120fps with dlss3 has the input latency and feel of Gaming at 40fps. You also can't cap your fps.

[u/Substance___P]

The AI generated frames will never be perfect. This is to preserve sense of motion by smoothing out frame pacing. It isn't really something you can quantify easily, but I think Digital Foundry and HUB did what could be done.

You shouldn't buy these cards just for DLSS 3. It's just another tool in the toolbox to tune your experience.

[u/team56th]

It's marketed and wilfully received as a tool to get cumbersome 30-40fps workload to run at 60-80fps, the framerate band that makes most difference, but in reality it's mostly a 60-120fps to 120-240fps feature which is a bit of a luxury applications, and that is just for relatively latency insensitive cases. I'd say this is a luxury feature much unlike DLSS2 or FSR1/2.

[u/kagoromo]

That certainly soured my expectation for frame duplication tech a bit. That said, my use case is arguably the best scenario for it still: turn-based game so no huge needs for low input latency, no fast, constantly moving scenes, CPU bottlenecked or frame rate locked to around 60 FPS. I will continue to keep an eye on its development.