Dakar Desert Rally, the open world rally racing game developed by Saber Interactive Porto and launched last month, is one of the first games already available on the market that will be getting NVIDIA DLSS 3 support in the future. The new upscaling technology, which is exclusive to the RTX 4000 series GPUs for the time being, brings up to 4x performance acceleration, among other improvements.
In the past few days, we spoke with Studio Director and Game Director Paulo Gomes about NVIDIA DLSS 3, the improvements it brings to the game’s performance and visual fluidity, and the opportunities the new tech from NVIDIA can bring. As a reminder, Dakar Desert Rally is out now on PC (Steam, Epic Games Store), PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S|X.
What was your first impression of DLSS 3 as a developer? Do you feel that AI-based Frame Generation is the future of rendering to keep up with advanced ray tracing effects?
Our first impression was amazement. It’s really impressive how DLSS 3 was able to double our framerate. It’s an incredible improvement to the visual fluidity of our game.
How much of an improvement does DLSS 3 introduce in your game compared to DLSS 2 (Super Resolution)?
It’s a really significant improvement. DLSS 3 completely doubles our framerate compared to only using DLSS 2.
One of the potential drawbacks of DLSS 3 is the additional latency. Does Frame Generation add significant latency in your implementation, or is Reflex able to cover that?
During numerous tests, we didn’t see any significant increase in latency. Overall we’d say it was pretty negligible.
Do you have an ETA on when DLSS 3 will be added to your game?
We are actively working on implementing DLSS 2 in our upcoming patch. We are seeing some great results, and it is a nice improvement. In a future update, we will transition to DLSS 3 for even better performance.
The new GeForce RTX 4000 Series also introduced features like Shader Execution Reordering (SER), Opacity Micro-Maps (OMM), and Displaced Micro-Mesh (DMM) to help with ray tracing optimization. All of these have to be explicitly enabled and set up by game developers. Are you planning to take advantage of any of them?
These are exciting new technologies, and we are eager to start working with them! At the moment, we are working on implementing ray tracing in a future performance patch, and we are investigating specific RTX 4000 features that we may implement down the road.
Lastly, on a separate note, what do you think of RTX Remix as a developer?
Without a doubt, it is a great opportunity to revisit and reimage classic titles using ray tracing technology. Giving some beloved titles new life with updated and modern-looking visuals is exciting, and we’ve seen some great recent successes.
Thank you for your time.
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