Unity 2021.2 will adopt NVIDIA DLSS technology

First-generation technology often doesn't get things quite right, as was the case with NVIDIA's DLSS technology. This machine learning based technique made its debut with the launch of Turing and got a big upgrade just over a year ago. DLSS 2.0 works surprisingly well to offer higher framerates at image quality settings that are unplayable without switching on DLSS.

AMD has yet to reveal its DLSS rival and we know Intel is working on a similar technique for its future Xe-based gaming GPUs. The FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) technology from AMD is expected sometime later this year, likely later rather than sooner. The latest rumors indicate AMD aims at a late-2021 launch for FSR. In the meantime, the DLSS ecosystem is growing every month.

Unity pledges support for DLSS

Earlier this year a DLSS plug-in for Unreal Engine was revealed and today's big news is that Unity is adding native support for NVIDIA DLSS via the upcoming Unity Engine 2021.2 update.

Unity made real-time ray tracing available to all of their developers in 2019 with the release of 2019LTS. Before the end of 2021, NVIDIA DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) will be natively supported for HDRP in Unity 2021.2. NVIDIA DLSS uses advanced AI rendering to produce image quality that’s comparable to native resolution–and sometimes even better–while only conventionally rendering a fraction of the pixels. With real-time ray tracing and NVIDIA DLSS, Unity developers will be able to create beautiful real-time ray traced worlds running at high frame rates and resolutions on NVIDIA RTX GPUs. DLSS also provides a substantial performance boost for traditional rasterized graphics.