Just last week, Nvidia and Microsoft announced new ray tracing features with the launch of DirectX 12 Ultimate. Now, Nvidia is following that up with a second iteration of its DLSS (deep learning super sampling) technology. Nvidia claims DLSS 2.0 will greatly improve game visuals and performance using its artificial intelligence-based approach to rendering.
The format was originally introduced with Nvidia’s Turing architecture, which debuted on the company’s GeForce RTX 2080 graphics. DLSS uses machine learning to analyze tens of thousands of reference images to help increase frame rates.
Unlike the olde, temporal anti-aliasing-based rendering approach, DLSS conserves system resources by examining a lower resolution scene and compares it to the reference images to determine how the scene should be rendered at a higher resolution. For Nvidia, it was a way of compensating for the heavy toll that ray tracing took on performance.
With DLSS 2.0, Nvidia aims to close the performance gap further. Even on midrange GPUs like the RTX 2060, Nvidia claims you should see a boost in frame rates, visual fidelity, and scene details.
Nvidia executives showcased the power of DLSS in a number of demos prior to the feature’s announcement, comparing the performance with DLSS 2.0 enabled at 1440p resolution against a game without the feature turned on. The result was delightfully impressive.
In Mechwarrior 5, with DLSS disabled at 1440p resolution on the RTX 2060, the game played at a respectable 71 frames per second. With DLSS 1.0 enabled, performance jumped to 95 FPS, and you’re getting more visual details, better colors, and more realism — it’s like HDR for your game.
In the demo, the colors in the landscape were punchier, and the scene appears sharper, though text appears slightly blurry, a likely result of oversharpening. With DLSS 2.0 enabled, the scene benefits from the same enhanced details as DLSS 1.0, but here text appears to be crisper. Nvidia was able to achieve a similarly high 95 FPS with the new update, showing that you’re not trading off game performance for visual fidelity.
Control DLC will get updated to DLSS 2.0, and in that game, Nvidia showed that even peripheral background text in the game’s scene also gets sharpened, making text and details easier to read and see. When the game is played at 1080p resolution, you’re getting almost a 70 percent boost in frame rates with DLSS 2.0 enabled.
Whereas a game at 1080p played at just 36 FPS without DLSS, the same game jumps to 61 FPS with DLSS 2.0 while also providing upgraded visual fidelity, showing more details.
For fast, action-packed games, DLSS 2.0 will also improve the image quality of objects in motion, so you’re going to see crisper movements throughout the game. DLSS 2.0 is available now, Nvidia said, on titles such as Wolfenstein: Youngblood, Deliver Us the Moon, Mecharrior 5, and Unreal Engine, with dozens more titles coming soon.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Google DeepMind's AI world model Genie 4 can now build interactive worlds that you can explore and reshape as they run. It also generates ambient sounds, music, and dialogue that respond to your actions.
The new world model builds on Genie 3 with improved realism, more natural human movement, and better simulations of real-world physics. It could eventually help with everything from game development to training robots.
Apple has an incredible talent for making me admire its products while simultaneously questioning what on earth it's thinking with the pricing. This isn't even something as bizarre as a monitor stand, but the audacity for starting a new laptop lineup from $2,000 doesn't surprise me.
The newly announced 14-inch MacBook Pro with M6 is just the latest to showcase this. The funny thing is, I already know that it's going to be a reliable workstation. You get a powerful new 2nm M6 processor, a gorgeous Liquid Retina XDR display, and up to 24 hours of battery life. We were impressed by the M5 MacBook Air, so the high-end M6 powered MacBook Pro definitely won't let us down.