RTX and DLSS

Alongside the introduction of the new Blackwell-based GPUs, Nvidia had multiple new announcements on the tech side of things with their newest version of DLSS 4 with its addition of Multi Frame Generation. They also have Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing (DLAA) and Transformer based models to continue to improve the detail and accuracy of the AI-generated frames. So I am excited to see how it all performed. First up though I do have our standard 3Dmark DLSS comparison which I ran on every Nvidia card from the last two generations. For this test, I tested them all at 4k using the performance setting. I ran the same test with DLSS off, and then with DLSS 1, 2, and 3 to compare the performance between them. No surprise that the RTX 5090 is up at the top. But more importantly, this is a chance to see the performance improvements that can be capable. The 5090 went from 83 FPS up to 146 with DLSS 1. It then went farther up to 186 with DLSS 2 then ended up at an impressive 259 with DLSS 3. The graph doesn’t include it because it was still in beta but I did get to test the new DLSS 4 performance with Multi Frame Generation on at x2, x3, and x4 levels. The jump from the DLSS 3 result to x2 shows there was a small difference between my x2 results. With x3 the improvement was noticeable, it scored a 358.65 FPS result. But with it at the highest setting the 5090 finished the test with an FSP of 441.81. That’s an improvement of 426% over the non-DLSS result and is just mind-blowing. This is a synthetic benchmark and it’s a lot easier for deep learning super sampling to handle things when there isn’t any variability to the result. But it is still impressive to see what it can be capable of in a best-case scenario.

I also wanted to take a look at DLSS 4 performance as well a little more than my initial look at it with 3DMark’s benchmark. For this, I put Nvidias Frameview to the test to run a few benchmarks using the games that currently support DLSS 4. For games with a built-in benchmark, I ran the benchmark but used frameview so we could get the FPS and 1% lows. All of the tests were done at 1080p, 1440p, and 4k with the highest detail settings including the highest RTX settings. A few of these games had to be run on beta copies, namely Cyberpunk 2077, Hogwarts Legacy, Alan Wake 2, and Star Wars Outlaws. Marvel Rivals and Dragon Age both were on the public version but just used NV App’s override.

The first game tested was Dragon Age: The Veilguard and for this one, I did a test with DLSS 3 and 4 as well as with it off on all three resolutions. The performance improvements I saw in 3Dmark were here as well but a little smaller. At 4k for example the 5090 went from 94 FPS up to 269, a 186% improvement. The DLSS 3 to 4 gap was smaller at 31% but still notable. You can also see the 1% lows improve but the gap between those and the FPS gets wider.

For Hogwarts Legacy, I kept things simple with DLSS 4 on or off but it was interesting that the performance between the 4k and 1440p results were almost exactly the same with DLSS 4 on. At 4k the RTX 5090 improved 365% when running DLSS 4.

Next up was Cyberpunk 2077 and I changed things up here. This game had the option to switch between the Transformer and CNN models so I wanted to see what the performance difference between them was. At 1080p transformer was a little slower but it was just one FPS behind at 1440p and 4k. More importantly, though, I was more impressed with the overall quality of them. Pictures don’t show the improvement as much as seeing the improvement in smoothness and clarity but it is a noticeable difference. At 4k with all of the ray tracing options completely cranked up the 5090 still struggled with DLSS off coming in at just 33 FPS but at 119 with DLSS 4 on it was silky smooth.

With Marvel Rivals I had issues with my 1080p and 1440p testing (no performance improvement, sometimes less performance) but 4k is the only thing important with the RTX 5090 so I have included those. The 5090 went from 241 up to 366 which was a smaller improvement than I saw on some of the other games. But still a welcomed improvement. I imagine as we see this get fully implemented the issues I saw will get worked out and this is one of the games that will benefit the most from it.

My last test was in Alen Wake 2 and I was some inconsistencies here as well, namely the DLSS 4 1440p result which acted like it had a frame limit. Both the 1% low and total frame rate were locked in at 119 FPS. The other resolutions didn’t have this issue and you see a big improvement on both. At 4k it went from 47 FPS up to 165 and the 1% lows improved as well from 43 up to 76. Then at 1080, it jumped from 134 up to a crazy 418 FPS.