Nvidia Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS)

Nvidia is a company that makes graphics cards which render the high-quality graphics of modern video games. Nvidia came up with a technology called DLSS a few years back which was their biggest deep learning project ever. The project aimed at upscaling an image from a lower resolution to a higher resolution in video games so that the players are able to get higher frame rate and a smoother experience.

Gaming involves something called FPS (Frames Per Second) which is basically the number of frames that are being displayed on your monitor every second so the more frames that can be displayed on your screen every second, the smoother the video game on your screen will appear. Modern day games have very high-quality visual elements like fog, 3D textures, etc., which are very taxing on a GPU to render. This results in low FPS in video games.

Nvidia DLSS is a deep learning technology that is trained in such a way that it is able to make low quality images clearer at the expense of fewer resources from your computer system. For instance, imagine a very high-quality photograph of a mountain is shown to you and then a very bad and low-quality picture is shown to you. You will be able to identify some features of the mountain in that low quality photo because you have seen the high-quality image and your brain remembers it distinctly. This is exactly how the deep learning algorithms work.

The algorithms are input certain high-quality images during their training phase. Then the same images are again given to the algorithm but this time it is a bit lower quality. The algorithm is able to drawn parallels between both the images and then it tries to upscale the image to the higher resolution one, i.e., it tries to make the image sharper so that it matches the high-quality image very closely.

Now because DLSS upscales the images on its own, the graphics card doesn’t need to render such high-quality images and it only needs to render the low-quality images that are upscaled by DLSS technology. So, in this way the user is able to get more FPS at the cost of minimal loss in image quality.

The above images clearly shows the FPS gains which are seen by the user after enabling the DLSS on their system. Moreover, the image quality is identical in both the scenarios.