As part of GTC 2021, it was revealed today that NVIDIA DLSS, the image reconstruction technique powered by the Tensor Cores available in GeForce RTX graphics cards, will be natively supported by the Unity engine’s High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) by the end of the year with release 2021.2.
We might have guessed the news was coming when mere days ago NVIDIA DLSS was confirmed to be coming to NARAKA: BLADEPOINT, as that game is made with the Unity engine. Needless to say, though, having an engine-wide implementation is a big win for NVIDIA as it should entice a lot more developers to enable the feature, which is something we’ve already seen with the Unreal Engine 4 plugin. Apparently, it’ll take Unity developers only a few clicks to enable NVIDIA DLSS in their games. While Unity tends to be used by indie developers, some extremely popular games have been made with this engine recently, such as Steam Early Access sensation Valheim, megahit Genshin Impact, Oddworld: Soulstorm, Wasteland 3, Phasmophobia, Ooblets, and Temtem just to name a few.
One interesting tidbit is that in the announcement video below, there’s a demonstration of the puzzle game LEGO Builder’s Journey running with NVIDIA DLSS and ray tracing enabled. This pretty much confirms that the previous Apple Arcade exclusive is coming to PC and surely enough, after some digging, we found a new Steam page for this game. There’s no release date for it yet, though.
Separately from the GTC 2021 announcement, NVIDIA DLSS was revealed to be coming alongside ray traced shadows to the Soulslike title Mortal Shell. NVIDIA actually released a brand new Game Ready driver for this, version 466.11.
The official benchmark shows Mortal Shell gaining an absolutely impressive 130% performance boost at 4K resolution with NVIDIA DLSS Performance Mode enabled.
Additionally, the NVIDIA Reflex SDK update to further lower latency in Boost Mode has been made available in Valorant. Content creators will be happy to know that the popular Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) tool now natively supports NVIDIA Broadcast’s Noise Removal feature.
Six new G-SYNC Compatible displays were added to the official list, too: LG’s 27GP950; TVs from the 2021 B1 4K Series, 2021 C1 4K Series, 2021 G1 4K Series, and 2021 Z1 8K Series; and the MSI MAG 301 RF.
Last but not least, as is always the case, the GeForce Game Ready driver also includes a series of fixes. We’ve outlined them below, straight from the changelog document.
Game Ready Driver 466.11 Fixes
- [Supreme Commander/Supreme Commander 2]: The games experience low FPS. [3231218/ 3230880]
- [Adobe Camera RAW 12.x]: RAW files may show up black in Adobe Lightroom. [3266883/ 200717265]
- [VR]: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 VR may stutter if Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling is disabled. [3246674]
- Some displays may show incorrect color levels after booting into Windows. [3285148/3287063]
