What just happened? Nvidia's monthly update on DLSS-supported games adds nine new titles to the list, including the first VR ones --- No Man's Sky, Wrench, and Into the Radius. Besides VR titles, Nvidia also announced that No Man's Sky and Wrench now support DLSS in desktop mode, alongside other titles such as Amid Evil, Aron's Adventure, Everspace 2, Redout: Space Assault, Scavengers, and Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition.
When playing No Man's Sky at 4K resolution with DLSS 'Performance Mode' enabled, players should expect up to a 70% increase in average FPS. In virtual reality mode, Nvidia claims that "DLSS doubles VR performance at the Ultra graphics preset," which is apparently enough to keep the frame rate above 90 FPS on the Oculus Quest 2 headset when using a GeForce RTX 3080.
The implementation of Nvidia's DLSS and the Expeditions update Hello Games launched on No Man's Sky might be enough to justify some gamers to hop back into a new space adventure.
It should be noted, these performance claims come directly from Nvidia, but based on our previous tests, DLSS 2.0 does deliver. So you can either recover back most of the performance lost after enabling ray tracing effects, or you can also get a huge performance boost if you run standard graphics but leveraging DLSS alone.
Also read: Ray Tracing & DLSS with the GeForce RTX 3080
Wrench also gets a significant performance increase with DLSS enabled. Depending on your system's configuration, driver version, and game settings, Nvidia DLSS can improve Wrench's framerate by up to 80% in VR mode and more than double the performance at 4K resolution.
The new Wrench update also adds support for ray-tracing effects, enabling enhanced ambient occlusion, reflections and shadows to add a new layer of realism into the mechanic simulator.
Nvidia hasn't shared any data regarding Into The Radius performance improvements with DLSS. In the other six titles mentioned in Nvidia's announcement, performance bumps from using DLSS range from 40% in Scavengers to +100% in Metro Exodus PC Enhanced Edition.
Now with 50 titles supporting DLSS, including a few VR games, it looks like we're finally seeing the adoption the technology arguably deserves. We can expect to see even more games with DLSS as the Unity engine will receive native support for DLSS, as well as the rumored new Nintendo Switch.
Don't forget AMD is also developing its own "DLSS" called FidelityFX Super Resolution. Although it hasn't been confirmed yet, AMD's upscaling technology should be based on Microsoft's DirectML API and is set for a release later this year.