Today, NVIDIA revealed a first look at the PC version of The Lord of the Rings Gollum running with DLSS 3 and ray tracing enabled.
Countless eyebrows were raised by PC gamers when Daedalic Entertainment shared the official PC system requirements for The Lord of the Rings Gollum. The RT Ultra preset reportedly required an RTX 4080 with DLSS Super Resolution set to Performance and 32GB of RAM, which seemed preposterous given the game’s fairly standard visual quality.
That seemed to be a recipe for bad performance. However, according to the benchmarks provided by NVIDIA, owners of RTX 40 series GPUs can still look forward to high frame rates with every setting turned on, ray tracing included, thanks to DLSS.
As always with these benchmarks, NVIDIA does not disclose the individual impact of DLSS 3 (Frame Generation) compared to DLSS 2 (Super Resolution). However, the combination of the two DLSS technologies provided a massive uplift. The RTX 4090 jumps by 3.5x, reaching almost 170 average frames per second, whereas the mighty GPU barely managed 48 FPS with native resolution.
Interestingly, while the RTX 4090 handily outperforms every other GPU in its generation, the others gain even more relative performance by comparison. The RTX 4080 leaps from 32.6 FPS to 123.3 (3.8x); the RTX 4070Ti pulls off the biggest jump of all, going from 26.1 FPS to 102.3 FPS (3.9x); and even the RTX 4070 runs The Lord of the Rings Gollum at nearly 80 frames per second thanks to DLSS 2+3, whereas it was stuck at just above 20.7 FPS at native resolution.
NVIDIA also shared benchmarks of The Lord of the Rings Gollum running on GeForce RTX 40 laptops. The difference with desktop GPUs is significant: the RTX 4090 laptop edition runs at 143.5 average frames per second at 1440p resolution. At 1080p, it breaks 200 average FPS, but it’s obviously not meant for that resolution. Overall, the performance uplifts are around 2-2.5x.
The Lord of the Rings Gollum launches in two days when you can expect to read our performance test and full game review.
NVIDIA also confirmed that two additional games have recently received DLSS 2 support: the 3D puzzle platformer Togges and the long-awaited new adventure game from Myst creator Cyan Worlds, Firmament. Both games are available now on Steam.
