With the release of Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty, DLSS will get its next major upgrade in the form of Ray Reconstruction with support across all GeForce RTX GPUs. We’ve already covered the whys and hows of DLSS 3.5. You can go through that here. In a nutshell, the denoisers used in existing ray-tracing implementations interpolate the final image using temporal and/or spatial data. This often leads to the accumulation of “bad frames” that manifest as blurry or aliased reflections, missing shadows, and ghosting.
Ray Reconstruction in DLSS 3.5 has been trained (on 5x more data than DLSS 3) to recognize various ray-traced effects, including shadows, reflections, and ambient lighting. This results in a clearer and more detailed image that doesn’t include many bad pixels or artifacts. In addition to the low-resolution inputs and motion vectors, the high-frequency sampled rays must be fed to the neural network.
This produces an output that considers bad pixels, potential ghosting, and various ray-tracing effects. Let’s have a look at how DLSS 3.5 improves image quality in Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty.
One of the most obvious improvements comes in the form of clearer, anti-aliased reflections that retain more detail through the upscaling process. In the below close-up, you can see the reflection of the vegetation on the left is less blurry, with more defined boundaries for every other reflection in the scene as well.
In this particular example, we see how some of the reflection details that are lost with DLSS 2 are retained with DLSS 3.5. Note the reflection near the top, close to the pavement. DLSS 2 and FSR 2 almost completely miss the dividing bars, while DLSS 3.5 retains it with proper clarity.
In this close-up, the reflection from the upper floor of the building is properly rendered with DLSS 3.5, while DLSS 2 and FSR 2 completely miss it. While you’re at it, note how the overall reflection is much clearer, too. The existing upscalers produce fuzzy reflections, a side-effect of temporal upscaling.
Continue to the next page for more DLSS 3.5 comparisons and close-ups…
