Rays Up: Decoding AI-Powered DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction
24/04/2024
AI continues to raise the bar for PC gaming.
DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction creates higher quality ray-traced images for intensive ray-traced games and apps. This advanced AI-powered neural renderer is a groundbreaking feature that elevates ray-traced image quality for all GeForce RTX GPUs, outclassing traditional hand-tuned denoisers by using an AI network trained by an NVIDIA supercomputer. The result improves lighting effects like reflections, global illumination, and shadows to create a more immersive, realistic gaming experience.
A Ray of Light Ray tracing is a rendering technique that can realistically simulate the lighting of a scene and its objects by rendering physically accurate reflections, refractions, shadows and indirect lighting. Ray tracing generates computer graphics images by tracing the path of light from the view camera - which determines the view into the scene - through the 2D viewing plane, out into the 3D scene, and back to the light sources. For instance, if rays strike a mirror, reflections are generated.
A visualization of how ray tracing works. It's the digital equivalent to real-world objects illuminated by beams of light and the path of the light being followed from the eye of the viewer to the objects that light interacts with. That's ray tracing.
Simulating light in this manner - shooting rays for every pixel on the screen - is computationally intensive, even for offline renderers that calculate scenes over the course of several minutes or hours. Instead, ray samples fire a handful of rays at various points across the scene for a representative sample of the scene's lighting, reflectivity and shadowing.
However, there are limitations. The output is a noisy, speckled image with gaps, good enough to ascertain how the scene should look when ray traced. To fill in the missing pixels that weren't ray traced, hand-tuned denoisers use two different methods, temporally accumulating pixels across multiple frames, and spatially interpolating them to blend neighboring pixels together. Through this process, the noisy raw output is converted into a ray-traced image.
This adds complexity and cost to the development process, and reduces the frame rate in highly ray-traced games where multiple denoisers operate simultaneously for different lighting effects.
DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction introduces an NVIDIA supercomputer-trained, AI-powered neural network that generates higher-quality pixels in between the sampled rays. It recognizes different ray-traced effects to make smarter decisions about using temporal and spatial data, and retains high frequency information for superior-quality upscaling. And it recognizes lighting patterns from its training data, such as that of global illumination or ambient occlusion, and recreates it in-game.
Portal with RTX is a great example of Ray Reconstruction in action. With DLSS OFF, the denoiser struggles to reconstruct the dynamic shadowing alongside the moving fan.
With DLSS 3.5 and Ray Reconstruction enabled, the denoiser is trained on AI and recognizes certain patterns associated with shadows and keeps the image stable, accumulating accurate pixels while blending neighboring pixels to generate high-quality reflections.
Deep Learning, Deep Gaming Ray Reconstruction is just one of the AI graphics breakthroughs that multiply performance in DLSS. Super Resolution, the cornerstone of DLSS, samples multiple lower resolution images and uses motion data and feedback from prior frames to reconstruct native-quality images. The result is high image quality without sacrificing game performance.
DLSS 3 introduced Frame Generation, which boosts performance by using AI to analyze data from surrounding frames to predict what the next generated frame should look like. These generated frames are then inserted in between rendered frames. Combining the DLSS-generated frames with DLSS Super Resolution enables DLSS 3 to reconstruct seven-eighths of the displayed pixels with AI, boosting frame rates by up to 4x compared to without DLSS.
Because DLSS Frame Generation is post-processed (applied after the main render) on the GPU, it can boost frame rates even when the game is bottlenecked by the CPU.
Generative AI is transforming gaming, videoconferencing and interactive experiences of all kinds. Make sense of what's new and what's next by subscribing to the AI Decoded newsletter.
More from Nvidia
31/05/2024
NVIDIA Grace Hopper Superchip Accelerates Murex MX.3 Analytics Performance, Reduces Power Consumption
After the 2008 financial crisis and increased risk-management regulations that f...
30/05/2024
Elevate Your Expertise: NVIDIA Introduces AI Infrastructure and Operations Training and Certification
NVIDIA has introduced a self-paced course, called AI Infrastructure and Operatio...
30/05/2024
GeForce NOW Brings the Heat With World of Warcraft'
World of Warcraft comes to the cloud this week, part of the 17 games joining the GeForce NOW library, with seven available to stream this week. Plus, it's ...
29/05/2024
Riding the Wayve of AV 2.0, Driven by Generative AI
Generative AI is propelling AV 2.0, a new era in autonomous vehicle technology characterized by large, unified, end-to-end AI models capable of managing various...
29/05/2024
Tidy Tech: How Two Stanford Students Are Building Robots for Handling Household Chores
Imagine having a robot that could help you clean up after a party - or fold heap...
29/05/2024
Decoding How NVIDIA RTX AI PCs and Workstations Tap the Cloud to Supercharge Generative AI
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI Decoded series, which demystifies...
27/05/2024
NVIDIA Scoops Up Wins at COMPUTEX Best Choice Awards
Building on more than a dozen years of stacking wins at the COMPUTEX trade show's annual Best Choice Awards, NVIDIA was today honored with BCAs for its late...
23/05/2024
Senua's Story Continues: GeForce NOW Brings Senua's Saga: Hellblade II' to the Cloud
Every week, GFN Thursday brings new games to the cloud, featuring some of the la...
23/05/2024
Into the Omniverse: SoftServe and Continental Drive Digitalization With OpenUSD and Generative AI
Editor's note: This post is part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused on ...
21/05/2024
Watt a Win: NVIDIA Sweeps New Ranking of World's Most Energy-Efficient Supercomputers
In the latest ranking of the world's most energy-efficient supercomputers, k...
21/05/2024
New Performance Optimizations Supercharge NVIDIA RTX AI PCs for Gamers, Creators and Developers
NVIDIA today announced at Microsoft Build new AI performance optimizations and i...
21/05/2024
NVIDIA Expands Collaboration With Microsoft to Help Developers Build, Deploy AI Applications Faster
If optimized AI workflows are like a perfectly tuned orchestra - where each comp...
21/05/2024
A Superbloom of Updates in the May Studio Driver Gives Fresh Life to Content Creation
Editor's note: This post is part of our In the NVIDIA Studio series, which c...
20/05/2024
Every Company to Be an Intelligence Manufacturer,' Declares NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at Dell Technologies World
AI heralds a new era of innovation for every business in every industry, NVIDIA ...
16/05/2024
Fight for Honor in Men of War II' on GFN Thursday
Whether looking for new adventures, epic storylines or games to play with a friend, GeForce NOW members are covered. Start off with the much-anticipated sequel...
15/05/2024
NVIDIA, Teradyne and Siemens Gather in the City of Robotics' to Discuss Autonomous Machines and AI
Senior executives from NVIDIA, Siemens and Teradyne Robotics gathered this week ...
15/05/2024
Fire It Up: Mozilla Firefox Adds Support for AI-Powered NVIDIA RTX Video
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI Decoded series, which demystifies AI by making the technology more accessible, and which showcases new hardware, ...
15/05/2024
How Basecamp Research Helps Catalog Earth's Biodiversity
Basecamp Research is on a mission to capture the vastness of life on Earth at an unprecedented scale. Phil Lorenz, CTO at Basecamp Research, discusses using AI ...
15/05/2024
Needle-Moving AI Research Trains Surgical Robots in Simulation
A collaboration between NVIDIA and academic researchers is prepping robots for surgery. ORBIT-Surgical - developed by researchers from the University of Toront...
14/05/2024
Gemma, Meet NIM: NVIDIA Teams Up With Google DeepMind to Drive Large Language Model Innovation
Large language models that power generative AI are seeing intense innovation - m...
13/05/2024
Drug Discovery, STAT! NVIDIA, Recursion Speed Pharma R&D With AI Supercomputer
Described as the largest system in the pharmaceutical industry, BioHive-2 at the Salt Lake City headquarters of Recursion debuts today at No. 35, up more than 1...
13/05/2024
Drug Discovery, STAT! NVIDIA, Recursion Speed Pharma R&D With AI Supercomputer
Described as the largest system in the pharmaceutical industry, BioHive-2 at the...
12/05/2024
Dial It In: Data Centers Need New Metric for Energy Efficiency
Data centers need an upgraded dashboard to guide their journey to greater energy efficiency, one that shows progress running real-world applications. The formu...
12/05/2024
Generating Science: NVIDIA AI Accelerates HPC Research
Generative AI is taking root at national and corporate labs, accelerating high-performance computing for business and science. Researchers at Sandia National L...
12/05/2024
NVIDIA Blackwell Platform Pushes the Boundaries of Scientific Computing
Quantum computing. Drug discovery. Fusion energy. Scientific computing and physics-based simulations are poised to make giant steps across domains that benefit ...
09/05/2024
Through the Wormhole: Media.Monks' Vision for Enhancing Media and Marketing With AI
Meet Media.Monks' Wormhole, an alien-like, conversational robot with a quirk...
09/05/2024
Honkai: Star Rail' Blasts Off on GeForce NOW
Gear up, Trailblazers - Honkai: Star Rail lands on GeForce NOW this week, along with an in-game reward for members to celebrate the title's launch in the cl...
08/05/2024
Get On the Train' NVIDIA CEO Says at ServiceNow's Knowledge 2024
Now's the time to hop aboard AI, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang declared Wednesday as ServiceNow unveiled a demo of futuristic AI avatars together with...
08/05/2024
‘Get On the Train,’ NVIDIA CEO Says at ServiceNow's Knowledge 2024
Now's the time to hop aboard AI, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang declare...
08/05/2024
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang to Deliver Keynote Ahead of COMPUTEX 2024
Amid an AI revolution sweeping through trillion-dollar industries worldwide, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang will deliver a keynote address ahead of COMPUTE...
08/05/2024
AI Decoded: New DaVinci Resolve Tools Bring RTX-Accelerated Renaissance to Editors
AI tools accelerated by NVIDIA RTX have made it easier than ever to edit and wor...
07/05/2024
NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD to Power US Government Generative AI
In support of President Biden's executive order on AI, the U.S. government will use an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD to produce generative AI advances in climate scie...
06/05/2024
NVIDIA and Alphabet's Intrinsic Put Next-Gen Robotics Within Grasp
Intrinsic, a software and AI robotics company at Alphabet, has integrated NVIDIA AI and Isaac platform technologies to advance the complex field of autonomous r...
06/05/2024
A Mighty Meeting: Generative AI, Cybersecurity Connect at RSA
Cybersecurity experts at the RSA Conference this week will be on the hunt for ways to secure their operations in the era of generative AI. They'll find man...
02/05/2024
GeForce NOW Delivers 24 A-May-zing Games This Month
GeForce NOW brings 24 new games for members this month. Ninja Theory's highly anticipated Senua's Saga: Hellblade II will be coming to the cloud soon -...
02/05/2024
NVIDIA AI Microservices for Drug Discovery, Digital Health Now Integrated With AWS
Harnessing optimized AI models for healthcare is easier than ever as NVIDIA NIM,...
01/05/2024
Explainable AI: Insights from Arthur's Adam Wenchel
Arthur.ai enhances the performance of AI systems across various metrics like accuracy, explainability and fairness. In this episode of the NVIDIA AI Podcast, re...
01/05/2024
AI Takes a Bow: Interactive GLaDOS Robot Among 9 Winners in Hackster.io Challenge
YouTube robotics influencer Dave Niewinski has developed robots for everything f...
01/05/2024
Say It Again: ChatRTX Adds New AI Models, Features in Latest Update
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI Decoded series, which demystifies AI by making the technology more accessible, and which showcases new hardware, ...
29/04/2024
SEA.AI Navigates the Future With AI at the Helm
Talk about commitment. When startup SEA.AI, an NVIDIA Metropolis partner, set out to create a system that would use AI to scan the seas to enhance maritime safe...
25/04/2024
AI Drives Future of Transportation at Asia's Largest Automotive Show
The latest trends and technologies in the automotive industry are in the spotlight at the Beijing International Automotive Exhibition, aka Auto China, which ope...
25/04/2024
Into the Omniverse: Unlocking the Future of Manufacturing With OpenUSD on Siemens Teamcenter X
Editor's note: This post is part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused on ...
25/04/2024
Blast From the Past: Stream StarCraft' and Diablo' on GeForce NOW
Support for Battle.net on GeForce NOW expands this GFN Thursday, as titles from the iconic StarCraft and Diablo series come to the cloud. StarCraft Remastered,...
24/04/2024
Rays Up: Decoding AI-Powered DLSS 3.5 Ray Reconstruction
Editor's note: This post is part of the AI Decoded series, which demystifies AI by making the technology more accessible, and which showcases new hardware, ...
24/04/2024
Forecasting the Future: AI2's Christopher Bretherton Discusses Using Machine Learning for Climate Modeling
Can machine learning help predict extreme weather events and climate change? Chr...
24/04/2024
NVIDIA to Acquire GPU Orchestration Software Provider Run:ai
To help customers make more efficient use of their AI computing resources, NVIDIA today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Run:ai, ...
24/04/2024
How Virtual Factories Are Making Industrial Digitalization a Reality
To address the shift to electric vehicles, increased semiconductor demand, manufacturing onshoring, and ambitions for greater sustainability, manufacturers are ...
23/04/2024
Small and Mighty: NVIDIA Accelerates Microsoft's Open Phi-3 Mini Language Models
NVIDIA announced today its acceleration of Microsoft's new Phi-3 Mini open l...
22/04/2024
Climate Tech Startups Integrate NVIDIA AI for Sustainability Applications
Whether they're monitoring miniscule insects or delivering insights from satellites in space, NVIDIA-accelerated startups are making every day Earth Day. S...
18/04/2024
Wide Open: NVIDIA Accelerates Inference on Meta Llama 3
NVIDIA today announced optimizations across all its platforms to accelerate Meta Llama 3, the latest generation of the large language model (LLM). The open mod...