Native Nvidia DLSS support is coming to Unity

While Unity doubled-down on bringing ray tracing to its engine in 2019, for those without top-of-the-line graphics cards DLSS support is probably a bigger deal. Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling uses AI trained on comparisons between low-resolution and ultra-high-resolution images to upscale on the fly, providing a performance boost at the same time. It's been increasing framerates on games like Control, Cyberpunk 2077, and Death Stranding—at least for people with the RTX 20 and 30 series cards that support DLSS—and it'll be coming to even more games now that Unity will natively support it from version 2021.2, as Unreal Engine 4 does.

"With just a few clicks you will be able to activate DLSS in Unity," says Mathieu Muller, senior product manager of high-end graphics at Unity Technologies, "and choose between various quality options to get a boost of performance with equivalent if not better visual quality, enabling high-end graphics, 4K gaming, games with high framerates, realtime ray tracing and high-end VR."

The video above demonstrating DLSS improvements in Unity ends with a showcase of games made in the engine. While its name has become a shorthand among opinionated forumites for shoddiness, it's a nice reminder that Unity has been made to make varied games with such wildly differing visuals as Escape from Tarkov, Genshin Impact, Disco Elysium, Outer Wilds, and Hardspace: Shipbreaker.