RTX and DLSS

Being an RTX card I also like checking out the performance of some of Nvidia’s features. Namely the ray tracing performance and the performance improvements you can see by using DLSS combined with the tensor cores. In most of the tests, I’m only comparing a few of the RTX cards as well as a GTX 1080 Ti for comparison. But in the 3DMark Port Royal test, I have been tracking ray tracing performance in all of the RTX cards as well as a few of the GTX cards introduced into the mix as well. Here the 3060 Gaming X Trio jumped ahead of the 2060 SUPER Gaming X due to the overclock.

I then jumped into game tests, this time with the just recently released Watch Dogs: Legion. For this one, I wanted to get an idea of the performance you will see when taking advantage of Nvidia’s RTX and DLSS features. Here I tested with both on, just RTX on, and with neither on. The performance here was the same as the XC Black which struggled with RTX on unless DLSS was also turned on, getting better performance with DLSS and RTX than with both off.

Next, I wanted to check out the performance in Metro Exodus which I do our normal testing in as well. Here the Gaming X Trio gained 1 FPS over the XC Black with RTX only, almost two with DLSS added on to that, and was similar in the DLSS only result. These results again show that DLSS is a great way to get ray tracing without taking a big performance hit. Obviously, the RTX 3060 isn’t an idea 4K card and our RTX and DLSS tests are all done in 4K but you can see similar performance at lower resolutions as well.

With Wolfenstein: Youngblood I tested at 4K using their Mein Lenen! Detail setting which is the highest detail. I tested with RTX on and just compared running with DLSS on the balanced setting and with it off entirely. The RTX 3060 Gaming X Trio came in at the same 41 FPS with no-DLSS turned on as the XC Black but did get one more FPS when the DLSS was turned on. Overall this test shows how much of an improvement DLSS can get you in Wolfenstein: Youngblood and it was the difference between playable and over 60 FPS which is a huge difference.

Next, I tested using a benchmark based on the game Boundary. For this one, I wanted to see how all of the different DLSS settings would perform, including turning it off completely. At 4k the RTX 3060 was obviously out of its league here, but the jump from no DLSS up to the DLSS quality setting was big going from 9.6 to 17.4 FPS. DLSS balanced helped slightly but the jump up to the performance DLSS setting was nearly enough to make things playable on the 3060 which isn’t designed at all for 4k.

The last tests were done in a benchmark based on the game Bright Memory. Here I wanted to check out the performance difference between different RTX settings. Once again the RTX 3060 did struggle at 4k as expected, but it does let us see the performance difference between the different RTX settings. Each of the settings between very high, high, and normal were all close to 3 FPS difference between each though the RTX high result did gain one FPS over the XC Black changing that slightly. Then the RTX low has a much bigger gap with a 6 FPS difference between it and the RTX normal setting..