I don’t think it will be a surprise to anyone that Diablo 4 in the short period of time that it has been out has been extremely popular. It is Blizzards fastest selling game and I know early on the login queues were crazy. It is also by far the most popular game that supports DLSS 3 of the current 37 games on Nvidia’s always helpful game listing. With that, I can’t think of a better game to check out DLSS 3 performance on to see what kind of performance improvement you can expect. This also means I will get a look at how the new RTX 4000 Series cards perform on the game as well. So let’s dive in and see what the numbers look like.

Article Name: Testing DLSS 3 on Diablo IV

Written by: Wes Compton

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Test Rig Configuration

CPU: Intel Core-i9 13900K – Live Pricing

Motherboard: Asus Z790 Extreme – Live Pricing

Cooling: Corsair H100i Elite LCD Display - Live Pricing

Noctua NT-H1 Thermal Paste - Live Pricing

Memory: Crucial 32GB Kit (2 x 16GB) DDR5-5600 UDIMM– Live Pricing

Storage: Sabrent Rocket Q4 2TB – Live Pricing

Power Supply: Be Quiet Dark Power Pro 1600W - Live Pricing

Case: Primochill Wetbench - Live Pricing

OS: Windows 11 Pro 64-bit - Live Pricing

DLSS 3 Performance

For testing, I went into the first town and using Nvidia Frameview benchmarked the performance as I walked through the town, inside of a building with people, and also around fires. As for how this performance compares to your other experiences in the game, I can confirm that the frame rate will drop a little when you are fighting, but I wasn’t able to include that in the test and replicate it exactly the same way each time. I tested all five of Nvidia’s current 4000 Series cards and I tested at 4K and 1440p for resolutions and did the tests on the ultra detail setting. You also need to make sure to set the max FPS up to max which is 400 FPS, it is defaulted to 150, and with some cards that would limit performance. I then tested each resolution with DLSS Off, DLSS on, and also with frame generation on. The below table breaks down everything.

No big surprises in the overall performance of cards like the RTX 4090 which put up crazy numbers. But what did stand out to me right away was that with those higher-end card frame generation didn’t increase performance, in fact, it went down when compared to the pure DLSS performance. That said both results are still higher than the base no DLSS result. For the 4090 at 4K performance from DLSS increased by 66% whereas it was 40% when using DLSS with frame generation. The 4090 didn’t have that big of an increase at 1440p because of the 400 FPS limit and there frame generation was 1 FPS slower than no DLSS at all (again because of the 400 FPS cap) but you can see the improvement still in the 1% lows.

Once you get past the 4090 the performance increase goes up at 4K, at 1440p the FPS cap hurts things until we get even farther down into the cards. One thing is for sure though the 4060 Ti benefits the most from DLSS. The other big surprise is that frame generation hurt performance in a majority of the tests. At 4K the RTX 4070 both benefited from it but then the 4060 Ti lost some performance with it. Then at 1440p the only card that benefited was the 4060 Ti. That is if we are looking at the average frame rate results but the 1% lows help three of the cards at 4K and the bottom two at 1440p, to help show that I have color coded the percentages.

In the end, the DLSS performance helped the cards at 4K the most, at 1440p all of the cards had solid performance already but at 4K the 4060 Ti was able to go from 57 FPS up to 109  FPS which will make it smooth and playable even when you get into fights and that is at a resolution the 4060 Ti has no business being used at. The frame generation performance issues are a bummer and can cause some confusion for users who would assume that is going to help give even better performance. In some cases it does, but in a majority of cases, it didn’t. This is one of those outlier situations where the game is optimized well enough that it is loading frames faster than frame generation can, causing performance to drop when you run it. DLSS on the other hand should be on all of the time, it will get you big performance increases or if you are running the FPS limit at the stock 150 limit it will help your GPU use even less power and create less heat. 

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.