Nvidia's DLSS technology is set to become available to more game developers soon, as the company today announced that Unity is adding support for it in the upcoming release of Unity 2021.2. DLSS support will be included as part of Unity's High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP).
DLSS, or Deep Learning Super Sampling, is a technique that allows games to be rendered using conventional methods at lower resolutions, and to then take that image and process it using Nvidia's artificial intelligence processors, called Tensor Cores. This processing can take that lower resolution image and bump it up to a higher resolution, with a trained AI model that can often deliver similar or better visuals than what you might get using conventional rendering alone. Otherwise, similar visual results can also be obtained with much lower performance requirements, enabling higher framerates in games.
However, DLSS is a feature that has to be implemented per game, and not every developer can easily gain access to it. With Unity being such a common engine for smaller and medium-sized game developers, having DLSS built into the development tools can make it accessible to a broader range of games. As Mathieu Muller, Senior Product Manager for High End Graphics at Unity, explains in the video above, DLSS will be available with just a few clicks, with developers being only having to adjust some values to reap the benefits of the technology.
No specific Unity titles were announced to be in the works, but multiple popular games are based on Unity - such as Fall Guys, Genshin Impact, Outer Wilds, and Oddworld: Soulstorm. There's potential for any of those titles to get a performance boost thanks to the technology. As to when that will actually be possible, Unity 2021.1 was released just a few weeks ago, and version 2021.2 is in alpha testing right now, so it may take some time for it to be fully available.
