What is DLSS? I don´t get it.

[Don Cool]

Explain it to me like I was a one year old toddler in diapers.

I did read 4 articles and none seem to address my only question which involve the upscaled and the target resolution, apparently DLSS can upscale from 720p and 1024p, how does one choose this?

One of the articles;

https://www.tomshardware.com/reference/what-is-nvidia-dlss

So, I am a toddler who wants to play a game. I go into the settings and choose a resolution, for this example I choose 1440p and enable DLSS. How do I know which resolution it´s upscaling? Does it default to 1024p? I am not seeing two options in the resolution settings, one for target and one for upscaling.

[Tonepoet]

It stands for Deep Learning Super Sampling. Super Sampling is just another way of saying anti-aliasing, basically.

It is basically fancier version of anti-aliasing, enhanced with generative A.I. that sharpens the image and makes it look truer to life. However, like all forms of anti-aliasing, it's kind of just a fake way of smoothing out the image to hide the edginess of the pixels.

In the simplest possible terms, it is antialiasing, except better applied so it doesn't look quite as much like you just smeared vaseline all over your monitor.

[C1REX]

It’s image reconstruction but more commonly called upscaling.

If you set 1440p resolution in game then adding DLSS will lower your input resolution and upscale/reconstruct the image back to 1440p. It usually gives a noticeable boost to performance for hopefully minimal cost to image quality.

At 1440p these are the hidden numbers:
DLSS quality = input resolution is 960p
DLSS balanced = input resolution is 835p
DLSS performance = 720p.

DLSS works best at higher resolutions.

You can’t manually set upscaling input resolutions. So you can’t upscale from 1080p to 1440p. You only have presets vast majority of the time. Very rarely you have percentage sliders for more precise tuning.

[nullable]

Originally posted by Don:

Explain it to me like I was a one year old toddler in diapers.

I did read 4 articles and none seem to address my only question which involve the upscaled and the target resolution, apparently DLSS can upscale from 720p and 1024p, how does one choose this?

You need to have a 20 series or new Nvidia GPU. A game must have added support for DLSS. If both condition are true then you should be able to find DLSS options in the games graphics/video setting of the game.

If one of the conditions is not true then FSR might be an option, if the game has implemented FSR. FSR is kind of like AMD's version of DLSS, but it has wider hardware support because it doesn't depend on specific Nvidia architecture.

[Don Cool]

Originally posted by C1REX:

It’s image reconstruction but more commonly called upscaling.

If you set 1440p resolution in game then adding DLSS will lower your input resolution and upscale/reconstruct the image back to 1440p. It usually gives a noticeable boost to performance for hopefully minimal cost to image quality.

At 1440p these are the hidden numbers:
DLSS quality = input resolution is 960p
DLSS balanced = input resolution is 835p
DLSS performance = 720p.

DLSS works best at higher resolutions.

You can’t manually set upscaling input resolutions. So you can’t upscale from 1080p to 1440p. You only have presets vast majority of the time. Very rarely you have percentage sliders for more precise tuning.

Thank you so much, this was the answer I was looking for.

To everyone, thank you for contributing and hugs.

[Worldzworstgamer]

It is garbage. That is what it is.

[skOsH♥]

It's "bonus frames"

Essentially the game is rendering different things in the games environment at different resolutions and then piecing together these frames, for a higher fps output with more visual fidelity than usual

It's useful in a few games, mostly cyberpunk, maybe red dead (although my older pc I got it to run at 74fps. It looked bad compared to running it now)