Nvidia and Epic Games have taken what may prove to be an important step in the long road to bringing ray-traced video game graphics to the masses.
Last week, Nvidia released a plugin for Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 that will allow developers to implement the chip maker’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology in their games much more easily than before. So far, developers have had to work with Nvidia to add DLSS to their games. That’s one reason the technology has limited use – it’s only available in 25 games at the moment, although manufacturers from more than a dozen others have announced plans to add DLSS support.
“UE4 integration is a critical step in making technology widespread in games,” said Henry Lin, senior product manager at Nvidia, in an interview with Polygon. “We worked closely with developers over the past year to bring DLSS technology to more than 20 creative games and applications based on UE4 through our DLSS UE4 Github integration. A UE4 market plug-in now accessible to all developers makes DLSS even simpler to integrate and will mean more DLSS games – from indies to AAA titles – for users to enjoy. “
Now that the plugin is available on the Unreal Engine Marketplace, developers who make projects on Unreal Engine 4 can “start using DLSS right away,” said Lin. Adding DLSS support to a game is likely to take a little more work than simply pressing a button, but Lin said Nvidia “was able to adjust the integration to work well out of the box for the vast majority of content”.
For the uninitiated, DLSS uses AI to accelerate the rendering of graphics by reconstructing the image, while maintaining high image quality while offering improved frame rates. Simply put, the technology allows a video card to render a game at a lower internal resolution – reducing the load on the GPU – as it uses Nvidia’s AI algorithm to generate a reconstructed image that looks as good as (or in some cases , better than) the game rendered in native resolution.
In games like Death Stranding and Fifteen days, enabling DLSS can double or even triple performance, making it possible to reproduce at frame rates above 60 frames per second in 4K resolution, when otherwise it would be impossible. Using DLSS performance mode, a GPU would only have to render the game in 1080p – producing a 4K image while rendering only a quarter of the pixels on the screen. It also allows players to increase settings without significantly reducing the frame rate.
DLSS is a proprietary technology from Nvidia and depends on the company’s line of RTX graphics cards, as they contain dedicated hardware – “tension cores” in silicon – that can handle Nvidia’s AI algorithm calculations. DLSS is essentially a mandatory feature for games that support real-time ray tracing, since this rendering technique is very computationally intensive. Without DLSS, it would be difficult to run games with ray tracing at playable frame rates (especially on weaker GPUs like some of the first generation RTX cards).
The initial version of DLSS, released in early 2019, required that the AI algorithm be trained separately with each game for it to work. Nvidia released DLSS 2.0 in the spring of 2020, and offered a crucial update: AI was now being trained with generic images, making it faster and easier for developers to implement DLSS in their games. It is likely that the new Unreal Engine plugin was not possible before DLSS 2.0.
Nvidia’s main rival, AMD, is working on its own alternative to DLSS, called FidelityFX Super Resolution. The technology was not ready in time for the company’s RX 6000 GPU line, launched last fall, and AMD has yet to give a launch window for it. But an important advantage that FidelityFX Super Resolution will have over DLSS is that AMD has promised to make it open rather than proprietary – Nvidia’s FreeSync for G-Sync – and cross platform. This means that the technology can also reach the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X; after all, the two consoles are equipped with AMD Radeon RDNA 2 graphics, as well as the RX 6000 GPUs.