Nvidia and Epic Games have taken an important step in the long road to bringing graphics graphics games among the masses.
Last week, Nvidia released a plug-in for Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 that enables developers to implement the chipmaker’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology much more easily than before in their games. Until now, developers had to work with Nvidia to add DLSS to their games. This is one of the reasons why the use of the technology is limited – it is currently only available in about 25 games, although the manufacturers of more than a dozen other plans have announced plans to add DLSS support.
“UE4 integration is a critical step in making technology pervasive in gaming,” said Henry Lin, senior product manager at Nvidia, in an interview with Polygon. ‘Over the past year, we have worked closely with developers to bring DLSS technology to more than 20 UE4-based games and creative applications through our DLSS UE4 Github integration. A market-leading UE4 plug-in now accessible to all developers makes DLSS even easier to integrate and will mean more DLSS games – from India to AAA titles – that users can enjoy. ”
Now that the plug-in is available on the Unreal Engine Marketplace, developers creating projects in Unreal Engine 4 can “start using DLSS immediately,” Lin said. Adding DLSS support to a game would probably take a little more work than just turning a switch, but Lin said Nvidia ‘could refine the integration to work well for the vast majority of the contents.’
For the uninitiated, DLSS uses AI to accelerate graphics rendering through image reconstruction, while maintaining high image quality while delivering improved image speed. Simply put, the technology allows a video card to deliver a game with a lower internal resolution – which reduces the load on the GPU – as it uses Nvidia’s AI algorithm to generate a reconstructed image that works as well seems like (or, in some cases, better) than) the game delivered in own resolution.
In games like Death Stranding and FortniteTurning on DLSS can double or even triple the performance, making it possible to play at frame rates of more than 60 frames per second in 4K resolution if otherwise impossible. Using DLSS performance mode, a GPU only needs to render the game at 1080p – to output a 4K image while displaying only a quarter of the pixels on the screen. It also allows players to turn on settings without dropping the frame rate too much.
DLSS is Nvidia’s proprietary technology and relies on the company’s RTX series of graphics cards, as it contains the dedicated hardware – ‘tensor cores’ on the silicon that can handle the calculations for Nvidia’s AI algorithm. DLSS is essentially a must-have feature for games that support real-time beam tracking, as the rendering technique is very computer-intensive. Without DLSS, it would be difficult to run games with ray tracing at playable frame rates (especially on weaker GPUs, such as some of the first generation RTX cards).
The initial version of DLSS, launched in early 2019, requires that the AI algorithm be trained separately with each game in order to work. Nvidia released DLSS 2.0 in the spring of 2020, and it offers a major upgrade: the AI is now being trained with generic images, making it faster and easier for developers to implement DLSS in their games. It is likely that the new Unreal Engine plugin would not be possible before DLSS 2.0.
Nvidia’s main competitor, AMD, is working on its own alternative to DLSS called FidelityFX Super Resolution. The technology was not ready in time for the company’s RX 6000 series GPUs launched last fall, and AMD has not yet released a release window for it. But a major advantage that FidelityFX Super Resolution will have over DLSS is that AMD has promised to open it up rather than own – the FreeSync for Nvidia’s G-Sync – and cross-platform. This means that the technology can 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.