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. My first test goes back to our synthetic benchmarks with 3DMark with the 3Dmark DLSS test. This test was done on each Nvidia card testing the performance of each compatible DLSS at 4k and the performance setting. For DLSS 4 the tests are run with frame generation set to x4. The RTX 5070 Founders Edition is the first of the 50 Series cards that drops down below a good chunk of the other cards when comparing the lower DLSS performance. With DLSS 2 it is below the RTX 4070 Ti. Once you get into DLSS 4 though you really see what can be possible with DLSS. The RTX 5070 Founders Edition started with 30 FPS and improved it up to 110 FPS with DLSS 3 and then again up to 195 FPS with DLSS 4 which is crazy. That is a 550% performance increase and you can see why Nvidia is focusing so much on improving the RT and Tensor cores each generation. It is where they can see huge performance improvements whereas with traditional raster performance, the gains are smaller.
For the first DLSS test, I jumped into Dragon Age: The Veilguard. Using the Nvidia App you can force DLSS 4 support on top of the games support for DLSS 3 making this a great game to compare the performance difference between DLSS 3 and 4 as well as no DLSS at all. I tested at all three resolutions and did it will ray tracing completely turned on and at the highest detail. The RTX 5070 Founders Edition struggled at 4k with DLSS off averaging 29 FPS but with DLSS 3 on that more than tripled to 95 FPS and with DLSS 4 it went to an impressive 178 FPS. At 1440o and 1080p, it was already playable with DLSS off but both DLSS 3 and 4 made high refresh rates possible going from 75 at 1440p up to 170 with DLSS 3 and 279 with DLSS 4. At 1080p it went from 104 up to 22 with DLSS 3 and 381 with DLSS 4.
Next up was Hogwarts Legacy, this time I didn’t have to use the Nvidia App to force anything on, the game supported it out of the box. Detail was set to ultra and every ray tracing setting was on and cranked up. For the DLSS 4 settings frame generation was set to x4. With the ray tracing cranked up the RTX 5070 Founders Edition struggled at 4k with DLSS off but went from 34 FPS up to 202 when turning DLSS 4 on, a 494% increase. At 1440p it went from 66 FPS up to 299, a 353% increase, and from 98 FPS at 1080p up to 364, a 271% increase.
For my next test, Star Wars Outlaws I tested with ultra detail, with cinematic lens turned on and set to ultra, and RTX direct lighting on and set to ultra and I found the limits of the RTX 5070 Founders Edition. At 4K it would crash with or without DLSS. At 1440p though it averaged 23 FPS with DLSS off and I saw 83 FPS with DLSS 4 on. Not as significant of an increase as some of the other games but still a 260% increase. Then at 1080p, it went from 37 FPS up to 131, an increase of 254%. Those two resolutions show that you can still enjoy the detail of running ray tracing at crazy settings and get smooth gameplay with DLSS 4 when without it you would get unplayable resolutions.
For my last DLSS test, I went back to Cyberpunk 2077. We do have Cyberpunk in our normal test suite but for this test, like with the others ray tracing was turned on completely and at its highest settings including path tracing. I also used this as a chance to compare the performance you might see using the old convolutional neural networks (CNN) against the new Transformer models. Like with Star Wars, with ray tracing this cranked up the RTX 5070 Founders Edition wouldn’t run at 4k without crashing so my tests were focused on 1440p and 1080p. Even at those resolutions with DLSS turned off it ran at just 24 and 37 FPS. Turning DLSS on helped turn that into a playable frame rate at both resolutions. The new Transformer model is a big improvement visually but you do trade off a few FPS, especially at 1440p where it went from 91 down to 85 FPS.
