In the early days of DLSS 1.0, when GeForce RTX 20 series GPUs made their debut, NVIDIA had talked about a technology called “DLSS 2x“, which should have used the same DLSS algorithm, but aiming for pure image quality without upscaling. However, DLSS 2x never saw the light, but we got DLSS 2.0, which brought noticeable improvements in quality and performance. Now, three years later, we finally have the long-awaited DLSS 2x, based on DLSS 2.x, but with a new name.
DLAA technology operates at native resolution using artificial intelligence-based enhancement algorithms to add further definition to the edges, while the temporal reconstruction recovers the lost details. According to Creative Director of The Elder Scrolls Online, Rich Lambert, “You won't get a performance boost, but you will have absolutely amazing anti-aliasing. […] You will need RTX 2000 or RTX 3000 series cards to take advantage of this. ”
This makes perfect sense, as DLAA has to do all the native rendering work, plus an extra step to remove the anti-aliasing and apply image enhancements. It will be most beneficial on games that are already running at high frame rates or those that tend to be more CPU-limited.
Credit: NVIDIA DLAA will first appear in The Elder Scrolls Online and is expected to be added with the upcoming Deadlands DLC. The latter is expected to debut next fall, but if you're curious, you can already try it out on the beta server right now.
It will be interesting to test DLAA in other games and compare it with other anti-aliasing solutions. While there are many demanding titles where native resolution rendering already proves pretty heavy even for the fastest graphics cards, especially with ray tracing effects enabled, there are plenty of other lightweight products that run at high fps that could benefit from a better anti-aliasing technique.