Unity will natively support DLSS ‘before the end of the year’

Unity has announced its engine will natively support the popular DLSS resolution technology before the end of the year.

DLSS is a feature exclusive to Nvidia’s RTX graphics cards and works by using AI to upscale the resolution of PC games, effectively allowing players to achieve higher graphical settings and better frame rates from their systems.

Previously the DLSS feature was limited to just a few games, but with the introduction of DLSS 2.0 last year, Nvidia said the AI behind the upscaling did not need to be trained specifically for each individual title.

Unity announced on Wednesday that DLSS will be natively supported via Unity’s upcoming 2021.2 update, which is due out before the end of the year.

“With just a few clicks, [developers] will be able to activate DLSS in Unity and choose between various quality options to get a boost in performance with equivalent, if not better, visual quality,” said Unity’s Mathieu Muller in a video update.

The release of the native Unity support should further broaden the accessibility of the feature, especially for smaller independent games. Recent tiles built with Unity include Valorant and Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout.

According to a Digital Foundry analysis, DLSS 2.0 at any normal screen distance “looks almost as good as the real thing.”

Alex Battaglia wrote of Control’s DLSS last year: “The quality of the image reconstruction is so good, you’ll have a hard time noticing whether it is on or off – and aspects of the image can look even better than native rendering, simply because DLSS doesn’t feature some of the deficiencies found in some temporal anti-aliasing solutions.”

He added: “Over the years, we’ve examined pretty much every ‘smart upscaling’ solution on the market and based on the upscaling ratios we’re working with here, DLSS is delivering the best mixture of image quality and performance improvements.”