[ad_1]
Nvidia and Epic Games have taken what could prove to be a significant milestone in the long road to bringing ray-traced video game graphics to the masses.
Last week, Nvidia released a plugin for Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 that will allow developers to implement the chipmaker’s super deep sampling (DLSS) technology much more easily than before. Until now, developers have had to work with Nvidia to add DLSS to their games. This is one of the reasons the technology has been limited in its use – it’s only available in around 25 games at the moment, although the makers of more than a dozen more have announced their intention. to add DLSS support.
“UE4 integration is an essential step in making technology ubiquitous in games,” said Henry Lin, senior product manager at Nvidia, in an interview with Polygon. “We have worked closely with developers over the past year to integrate DLSS technology into over 20 UE4-based creative games and applications through our DLSS UE4 Github integration. A UE4 Marketplace plugin now available to all developers makes DLSS even easier to integrate and will mean more DLSS games – from indie titles to AAA titles – for users to enjoy. “
Now that the plugin is available on the Unreal Engine Marketplace, developers working on projects in Unreal Engine 4 can “start using DLSS right away,” Lin said. Adding DLSS support to a game will likely take a little more work than just flipping a switch, but Lin said that Nvidia has “been able to adjust the integration to work properly soon. the start for the vast majority of the content. “
For the uninitiated, DLSS uses AI to speed up graphics rendering through image reconstruction, maintaining high image quality while delivering improved frame rates. Put simply, the technology allows a video card to render a game at a lower internal resolution – reducing the load on the GPU – because it uses Nvidia’s AI algorithm to generate a reconstructed image that looks just as good (or , in some cases better than) the game rendered at native resolution.
In games like Death Stranding and Fortnite, enabling DLSS can double or even triple performance, allowing you to play at frame rates above 60 fps at 4K resolution when otherwise would be impossible. Using DLSS’s performance mode, a GPU would only have to render the game at 1080p – producing a 4K image while rendering only a quarter of the pixels on the screen. It also allows gamers to increase settings without dropping the frame rate too much.
DLSS is Nvidia’s proprietary technology, and it is based on the company’s RTX line of graphics cards, as they contain the dedicated hardware – “tensor cores” on silicon – that can handle the computations for the AI algorithm. from Nvidia. DLSS is basically a must have feature for games that support real-time ray tracing, as this rendering technique is very computationally intensive. Without DLSS, it would be difficult to run ray-traced games at playable frame rates (especially on weaker GPUs like some first-gen RTX cards).
The initial version of DLSS, which launched in early 2019, required the AI algorithm to be trained separately with each game for it to work. Nvidia released DLSS 2.0 in the spring of 2020, and it offered a crucial upgrade: AI was now formed with generic images, which made it easier for developers to implement DLSS in their games. It is likely that the new Unreal Engine plugin would not have been possible before DLSS 2.0.
Nvidia’s main rival, AMD, is working on its own DLSS alternative called FidelityFX Super Resolution. The technology wasn’t ready in time for the company’s RX 6000 line of GPUs, which launched last fall, and AMD has yet to give a release window. But one big advantage FidelityFX Super Resolution will have over DLSS is that AMD has promised to make it open rather than proprietary – Nvidia’s FreeSync to G-Sync – and cross-platform. This means that the technology could also come to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X; after all, both consoles are powered by AMD Radeon RDNA 2 graphics, just like the RX 6000 GPUs.
[ad_2]
Source link