NVIDIA is introducing DLSS 3.5 later this year with a new AI-powered Ray Reconstruction technique that is designed to improve the quality of ray tracing across games. Unlike DLSS 3.0 which was limited to RTX 40-Series GPUs, DLSS 3.5 will boost the performance across all RTX GPUs going back to the RTX 20 Series.
DLSS 3.5’s strength comes from its focus on path ray tracing. If anything, the tech has been designed to improve what we know as “full ray tracing”. The difference between path ray tracing and other normal ray tracing is that path ray tracing affects everything in a scene rather than select elements like shadows and reflections.
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We saw the first full ray tracing experience released earlier this year in Cyberpunk 2077 when CDPR released its Overdrive RT Mode. It implemented path ray tracing in the game. Alan Wake 2 is also set to implement path ray tracing alongside Portal with RTX later this year.
NVIDIA says DLSS 3.5 will benefit regular ray-traced games by delivering improved image quality and performance. NVIDIA is attempting to improve the overall experience by using an AI-powered network that is capable of producing higher-quality pixels in cases where DLSS results in a lack of colour accuracy, inaccurate lighting and ghosting.
The company says DLSS 3.5 is trained on 5 times more data than DLSS 3 and in supported games, players can choose between their settings. This means DLSS 3.5 will be an optional setting compared to DLSS 3.
Of course, it is going to take some time before developers are able to implement DLSS 3.5 into their games. These games also need to be using an advanced version of the tech seen in path tracing. At the moment, there’s only one game, Cyberpunk 2077. Alan Wake 2 will add to this in October. Fortnite is also expected to get a DLSS 3 upgrade later this year and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is also launching with DLSS 3. However, we don’t know yet what DLSS 3.5 support it will get.
