As part of a press briefing that Wccftech attended last week, NVIDIA announced the next wave of games getting DLSS and RTX support, starting with Alan Wake II.
To the delight of every horror gamer, Remedy’s upcoming title (just delayed to October 27th in an attempt to avoid some other big releases due that month) will feature full ray tracing, also known as path tracing. Alan Wake II’s cutting-edge tech support feels like the obvious next step for Remedy’s Northlight technology after Control became the first real ray tracing showcase when it was released a few years ago.
All that visual splendor is likely to prove taxing on anyone’s PC configuration, which is where DLSS 3.5 support comes in. As clarified in our dedicated article, DLSS 3.5 is really a way to take advantage of NVIDIA’s advanced AI technologies to improve the quality of ray tracing further. A new technique called Ray Reconstruction (trained on 5X more data than Frame Generation, according to NVIDIA) is capable of incorporating additional engine data, recognizing different ray tracing effects as well as good and bad temporal and spatial pixels, and retaining high frequency data for upscaling.
Essentially, it is way smarter than regular ray tracing denoisers and can better preserve the quality of the rays traced when upscaling. It recognizes patterns that smartly generate lighting effects from multiple frames of the sampled rays.
DLSS 3.5’s primary goal is not to improve performance, then. However, NVIDIA showed a slight (around 10%) performance boost enabled by Ray Reconstruction in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty. The reason is that Ray Reconstruction has replaced multiple denoisers, thus freeing up some resources. It is unclear whether RR will also improve performance in Alan Wake II.
Critically, DLSS 3.5 (Ray Reconstruction) is also available for previous GeForce RTX graphics cards, including 20 and 30 Series. As such, a DLSS 3.5 game like Alan Wake II (or Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty) will offer Super Resolution and Ray Reconstruction to all RTX owners, while 40 Series owners also get Frame Generation on top of those.
During the press briefing, NVIDIA also announced DLSS 3 support coming to three major shooter games: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (out on November 10th), Payday 3 (out on September 21st), and Fortnite (through an update due this Fall). The first two games are also getting Reflex support, of course; Fortnite already has it.
In other NVIDIA Gamescom news, Alan Wake II and Payday 3 were confirmed to be coming to GeForce NOW. Also, Half-Life 2 RTX is in development thanks to a team of modders who will be using RTX Remix to take Valve’s masterpiece to a new level of visual fidelity; lastly, NVIDIA’s ACE AI-powered engine can now allow NPCs to express a range of emotions.
