Support for DLSS 2.1 virtual reality technology has been announced by NVIDIA. There are high expectations that this feature can significantly improve the performance of the game without sacrificing graphics detail.
NVIDIA announced that the new DLSS 2.1 will bring support for virtual reality, 8K, and dynamic resolution. The introduction of DLSS 2.1 will help bring more immersive virtual reality titles to next-generation headsets.
These VR headsets typically deliver a constant frame rate of 90 FPS at resolutions up to 2880×1600, some, such as Valve Index, even up to 144. DLSS technology allows VR games to be rendered natively at half resolution and intelligently scaled to ensure high quality and FPS.
How does DLSS 2.1 work?
NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), is a deep learning technique developed by NVIDIA that uses artificial intelligence to enhance rendered frames.
This technology, which must be added individually for each game, enables a significant performance boost by running the game at a lower resolution and scaling the image to nearly identical details. This technology is based on the Tensor Cores found in the RTX 20/30 series GPUs and allows performance increases of up to 70%.
VR games usually require a resolution of no less than 2880×1600 at a refresh rate of at least 90Hz, and some headsets like Valve Index even require up to 144Hz.
Playing the game at high frame rate to get high resolution, the demands on the graphics card are of course tough, now with the RTX 30 series and DLSS support, this is no longer a problem, so the game uses half the resolution for rendering, and then intelligently zooms to high resolution while still maintaining a sufficiently high frame rate.
NVIDIA has also provided a number of data showing that the RTX 3080 card can improve gaming performance by about 80 percent less or up to 1.7 times more when DLSS is enabled at 4K resolution.
Source: NVIDIA