When DLSS first appeared on the gaming scene in 2018 with Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 20xx series of GPUs, it seemed like an absolute miracle worker. And in many ways, the upscaling technology, which can significantly improve frame rates at no performance cost and only minimal visual cost, still is. Certainly on slightly older games, likeThe Witcher 3,Cyberpunk 2077, and Chernobylite (random example, I know, but I was particularly struck at the frame rate games provided by DLSS there), DLSS and AMD’s equivalent FSR tech can boost game performance from good to liquid-smooth.
But one of the more worrying trends of 2023, beyondthe small matter of wide-scale studio closures, was the sudden increase in games that seem to rely on DLSS and/or FSR to attain even decent performance. Back in July,Remnant 2developer Gunfire Games solidified this notion by saying in a Reddit post that they “designed the game with upscaling in mind.” That’s an alarming statement, especially given that Remnant 2 launched in a poorly optimised state, which kind of makes it sound like the upscaling is being used to offset the developer’s bad job at optimising (not that that stopped Remnant 2 become ourShooter of the Year in 2023).
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The DLSS Dream
It’s a far cry from the upscaling ‘dream’ that people on lower-end hardware will be able to play games well above their station thanks to the plucky tech, while those on higher-end hardware can enjoy demanding things like 4K resolutions and ray-tracing with the help of DLSS. Instead, in some cases (Alan Wake 2is another case in point), it means that people on solid mid-high-end hardware are struggling to play modern games at a decent quality without leaning on upscaling for support.
Playing on Performance mode gives you a peak behind the curtain of DLSS, reminding you that your frame rate is being padded out by a simulacrum of in-engine graphics rather than the real thing.
And let’s talk about ray-tracing for a second. The fancy lighting tech is on its third generation of GPUs now, and is still prohibitively performance-hungry. It honestly boggles the mind why a current-gen GPU like the RTX 4060 (let alone the laptop variant) lays claim to being a ray-tracing-enabled card when you’ll be hard-pressed to enable the feature on any current-gen games. Granted, the 4060 is an entry-level GPU, but it doesn’t really provide ‘entry’ into all of its advertised features. To use high-quality ray-tracing on Alan Wake 2 at 60fps, for example, you’ll need to have DLSS on and limit yourself to a paltry 1080p resolution.
Then there’s the fact that these technologies, while impressive, still offload a native frame rate churned out by your GPU into ‘streamed’ frames, which are reconstructed using deep learning, motion data, and all these clever things. You probably won’t notice this when using ‘Balanced’ or ‘Quality’ settings, but on ‘Performance’ you’ll definitely see some of the artefacting that results from upscaling.
Off-Peak Performance
Playing on Performance mode gives you a peak behind the curtain of DLSS, reminding you that your frame rate is being padded out by a simulacrum of graphics rather than the real thing. It’s like part-streaming a video of a game, rather than having it running natively, and that shouldn’t have to be a default condition for playing a game on modern hardware.
DLSS and FSR are fantastic technologies that have in some areas extended the lifespan of old GPUs. You should’ve seen the look on my tech-illiterate friend’s face when I enabled FSR 2 on his old Radeon RX 580 when playing The Witcher 3: Complete Edition, suddenly bolstering his frame rate by some 60% to cap out his 75Hz monitor. It was beautiful! But I really hope this trend of using them to make up for poor optimisation slows down in 2024.
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