What is NVIDIA DLSS and which games does it support?

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NVIDIA DLSS revolutionized graphics by boosting frame rates with AI super-resolution and Tensor Cores on GeForce RTX GPUs while delivering crisp, high-quality images that rival native resolution. Since the release of DLSS, 216 games and apps have used it, providing faster frame rates and the performance headroom needed to make real-time videogame ray tracing a reality.

What is DLSS?

Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) is an Nvidia RTX feature that uses artificial intelligence to boost a game’s framerate performance, which is useful when your GPU is struggling with intensive workloads.

When using DLSS, your GPU generates an image at a lower resolution to reduce hardware strain, and then adds additional pixels to upscale the picture to the desired resolution, using AI to determine what the final image should look like.

And, as many of us are aware, lowering the resolution of your GPU results in a significant frame rate boost, which is what makes DLSS technology so appealing, as you get both high frame rates and a high resolution.

DLSS is currently only available on Nvidia RTX graphics cards, including the 20-Series and 30-Series. AMD has a solution to this problem. FidelityFX Super Resolution offers a similar service and is available on AMD graphics cards.

DLSS is supported on the 30-Series line of GPUs because the RTX 3060, 3060 Ti, 3070, 3080, and 3090 have the second-generation Nvidia Tensor cores, which offer higher per-core performance and make DLSS easier to run.

Nvidia is also expected to announce the Nvidia RTX 4000 Series, codenamed Lovelace, during its September GTC 2022 Keynote. If you want to watch the event as it happens, make sure to read our guide on how to watch the Nvidia GTC 2022 Keynote.

While no official confirmation has been made, the RTX 4000 Series is expected to include the RTX 4070, RTX 4080, and RTX 4090. We anticipate that the Nvidia RTX 4000 Series will support DLSS to a greater extent than its predecessor, though we will update this article once we learn more about the Lovelace series and have reviewed it.

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What exactly does DLSS do?

Nvidia has gone through the process of teaching its AI algorithm to generate better-looking games and how to best match up with what’s already on screen, so DLSS is possible.

DLSS uses previous knowledge from its AI to generate an image that still looks like it was running at a high resolution after rendering the game at a lower resolution, with the overall goal of making games rendered at 1440p look like they’re running at 4K, or 1080p games in 1440p, and so on.

Nvidia claims that DLSS technology will continue to improve, but it is already a solid solution for anyone looking for significant performance boosts without the game looking or feeling too different.

Does DLSS impair visual quality?

One of the most common complaints about the technology when it first came out was that the upscaled image was often blurry and didn’t always look as detailed as the native image. Nvidia has since released DLSS 2.0. Nvidia now claims that image quality is comparable to native resolution.

Which graphics cards support DLSS?

Nvidia has made it fairly simple to determine which of its graphics cards support DLSS, as it is usually anything with ‘RTX’ in its name. But, just to be certain, we’ve listed all of the Nvidia GPUs that support the technology below:

GeForce RTX 2060
GeForce RTX 2060 Super
GeForce RTX 2070
GeForce RTX 2070 Super
GeForce RTX 2080
GeForce RTX 2080 Super
GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
Nvidia TITAN RTX
GeForce RTX 3060
GeForce RTX 3060 Ti
GeForce RTX 3070
GeForce RTX 3070 Ti
GeForce RTX 3080
GeForce RTX 3080 Ti
GeForce RTX 3090

What games support DLSS?

DLSS only works with supported games, so not every indie classic or blockbuster AAA title will be able to use this technology. The list is constantly growing, and you can see all of the games that support DLSS at the time of writing right below: