Native Nvidia DLSS support is coming to Unity

While Unity doubled-down on bringing ray tracing to its engine in 2019, for those without top-of-the-line graphics cards DLSS support is probably a bigger deal. Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling uses AI trained on comparisons between low-resolution and ultra-high-resolution images to upscale on the fly, providing a performance boost at the same time. It's been increasing framerates on games like Control, Cyberpunk 2077, and Death Stranding—at least for people with the RTX 20 and 30 series cards that support DLSS—and it'll be coming to even more games now that Unity will natively support it from version 2021.2, as Unreal Engine 4 does.

"With just a few clicks you will be able to activate DLSS in Unity," says Mathieu Muller, senior product manager of high-end graphics at Unity Technologies, "and choose between various quality options to get a boost of performance with equivalent if not better visual quality, enabling high-end graphics, 4K gaming, games with high framerates, realtime ray tracing and high-end VR."

The video above demonstrating DLSS improvements in Unity ends with a showcase of games made in the engine. While its name has become a shorthand among opinionated forumites for shoddiness, it's a nice reminder that Unity has been made to make varied games with such wildly differing visuals as Escape from Tarkov, Genshin Impact, Disco Elysium, Outer Wilds, and Hardspace: Shipbreaker.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.