Nvidia's DLSS 3.5 Tackles Ray-Tracing Quality And Is Available To All RTX Cards

Nvidia has announced a big update to its suite of DLSS (Deep-Learning Super Sampling) features, this time taking aim at improving the visual reconstruction of ray-traced effects in supported titles.

One of the biggest issues with image reconstruction currently when applied to ray-traced effects is the amount of noise that is introduced as a side effect, removing some of the sheen from the otherwise eye-catching effects. Nvidia is planning to use AI-trained denoisers to replace the current hand-tuned ones to clean up reconstruction noise more effectively, improving game performance while also preserving more of the original image.

Nvidia says it has trained its DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction model on five times as much data as the base DLSS 3 suite, which should hopefully produce some fine results. Thankfully you won't have to wait too long to sample it either, with Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, Alan Wake 2, and Portal RTX all supporting DLSS 3.5. Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2 will launch with support, while Portal will receive an update later this year.

Thankfully, unlike DLSS 3 Frame Generation, Ray Reconstruction will not be exclusive to Nvidia's latest and greatest GPUs. Nvidia says that this new addition to its reconstruction tools will be supported on all RTX-enabled graphics cards, stretching back to the initial RTX 20-series. That's great news if you love ray-tracing but struggle with the performance hit, and especially so for path-traced titles such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Portal RTX, where Nvidia says this will have the biggest performance uplift.

Nvidia chose to announce this new technology alongside news of Half-Life 2 RTX, which is being worked on with some of the original games' biggest modders and Nvidia engineers. It's also a timely announcement ahead of Gamescom, where AMD is rumored to be announcing FSR 3.0, which might ship with Starfield in early September.