One of my favorite multiplayer games of this year, Chivalry 2, just received DLSS support allowing for an impressive boost in performance. How much of an increase? According to the press release from Nvidia, this new update can jack up performance by 45%. Based on my own testing, Nvidia isn't wrong.
Best CPU for gaming: the top chips from Intel and AMD
Best graphics card: your perfect pixel-pusher awaits
Best SSD for gaming: get into the game ahead of the rest
One of the more interesting claims made by Nvidia is that you play Chivalry 2 at a 4K resolution with a frame rate of over 60 (with max graphical settings enabled) regardless of what GeForce RTX card you have. This means anyone still on an RTX 20-series GPU can hit these numbers.
DLSS stands for Deep Learning Super Sampling, Nvidia's AI-powered upscaling that gives you a considerable gaming performance boost regardless of hardware which has been a blessing for those running on last-gen RTX cards. It does this by making the game render at a lower resolution then using an AI algorithm that predicts how the game would look at higher resolution and outputs to the higher resolution without demanding more resources from your GPU. Basically, you can render games at 1440p, and DLSS does some math magic to output to your monitor at 4K.
The video above gives you a side-by-side comparison of the game running in 4K with DLSS on and off. Since I own an RTX 2070 Super, I'm essentially the target audience for this feature. Usually, at 4K on max settings, I get about 55 fps in Chivalry 2. Under DLSS "Performance" mode, that number increases to around 82 fps, an increase of 27 fps, or 49%. Balanced mode got me 73 fps, and Quality mode hit 66 fps, also at max settings. So it seems Nvidia isn't exaggerating the significant gains you can get from turning on DLSS.
Chivalry wasn't the only game to get a significant boost from DLSS in this week's GeForce update; Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy boasts nearly double the performance with raytracing thanks to the AI supersampling and upscaling tech.
Don't own an RTX card to take advantage of the DLSS boost?? You can stream Chivalry with Nvidia DLSS support on GeForce Now right now.
