Nvidia at Gamescom 2023 Surprises with DLSS 3.5, Half-Life 2 RTX and More!
Updated: Dec 18, 2023
Nvidia joined the Gamescom 2023 festivities at Cologne, Germany by dropping a couple of major announcements.
The tech giant at the annual games industry conference debuted DLSS 3.5, the latest version of its video rendering technology that boosts performance of games.
For those unfamiliar, DLSS stands for deep learning super sampling, a technique that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to boost frame rates by rendering frames at a lower resolution and upscaling them after. That way a game can look sharp while still being able to run at a high frame rate. The feature is exclusive to Nvidia graphics cards and works for a growing list of supported games.
DLSS 3.5 brings a new feature called Ray Reconstruction, which enhances ray traced image quality for all GeForce RTX graphics cards by replacing hand-tuned denoisers with a supercomputer-trained AI network that generates higher-quality pixels in between sampled rays.
The feature also improves image quality in real-time 3D creator applications, and would be included in upcoming releases of D5 Render, Chaos Vantage and Nvidia Omniverse.
Alan Wake 2, which releases in late-October, and Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, which releases in September, will be among the first games that take advantage of DLSS 3.5. Nvidia touts the two games would support the feature at launch with full ray tracing and Reflex. Valve's puzzle-platform hit Portal is also getting DLSS 3.5 support sometime in the fall season.
GeForce Now members can also stream DLSS 3.5 when Alan Wake 2, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty and the new update for Portal launches later in the year.
What's more, Nvidia promises to bring DLSS 3 and Reflex upgrades to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III and Payday 3 when both games launch. Fortnite, meanwhile, is getting DLSS 3 enhancements in the fall season.
Nvidia additionally announced Half-Life 2 RTX: An RTX Remix Project, which is essentially a remaster of the beloved first-person shooter with a fresh coat of paint. The game's community is said to be developing the project using RTX Remix and are rebuilding materials with Physically Based Rendering (PBR) properties to add more geometric detail to the game. They are also leveraging Nvidia technologies like full ray tracing, DLSS 3, Reflex and RTX IO to upgrade the visuals.
The first Xbox PC Game Pass games are also starting to hit GeForce Now. Among the first are Deathloop and Grounded, both of which will be available to stream starting 24 August. Members who have access to the two games via Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass or from the Microsoft store can stream them on GeForce Now without needing to buy them again.
Nvidia Ace, a custom AI model foundry that leverages a unique large language model (LLM) to create more lifelike non-playable characters (NPCs) in games, is also getting some advancements. The latest of which is NeMo SteerLM, a new technique that allows developers to customise the personality of NPCs to make them more emotive and have more varied interactions with players. Whereas regular LLMs provide neutral and ideal responses, LLMs trained on the SteerLM technique can provide responses aligned with a range of attributes, from humour to creativity. All these attributes can be configured through sliders, making them easy to scale.
Nvidia at Gamescom 2023 debuted debuted DLSS 3.5, the latest version of its video rendering technology that boosts performance of games.
DLSS 3.5 brings a new feature called Ray Reconstruction, which enhances ray traced image quality for all GeForce RTX graphics cards by replacing hand-tuned denoisers with a supercomputer-trained AI network that generates higher-quality pixels in between sampled rays.
Alan Wake 2 and Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty will be among the first games that take advantage of DLSS 3.5.
Nvidia also announced Half-Life 2 RTX: An RTX Remix Project, which is essentially a remaster of the beloved first-person shooter with a fresh coat of paint.