What is DLSS?

DLSS is a suite of AI-powered graphics techniques that run on the dedicated Tensor Cores inside GeForce RTX GPUs.

Instead of brute-forcing every pixel of every frame at your monitor’s native resolution, DLSS lets the game render a lower-resolution base image and then uses a neural network trained on thousands of high-resolution examples to reconstruct a crisper image at higher resolution in real time.

The result is often picture quality that practically matches that of a native rendered frame, but at a fraction of the workload, allowing for more frames per second to be generated for smoother gameplay.

DLSS has grown over the years into an umbrella term that covers several related technologies:

DLSS Super Resolution – AI upscaling that turns a lower-res frame into a higher-res one.

DLSS Ray Reconstruction – Does away with multiple ray-tracing denoisers for different games and uses a single transformer AI model to produce better lighting and shadows.

DLAA (Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing) – Uses the same neural network purely for high-quality edge smoothing at native resolution.

DLSS Frame Generation (introduced in DLSS 3) – Inserts an AI-predicted frame between two real ones, effectively doubling motion smoothness.

DLSS Multi Frame Generation (new in DLSS 4) – Goes even further, creating up to three AI frames for every 1 game-engine frame.

Taken together, these technologies boost framerates, stabilise ray-traced visuals, and sharpen detail, with NVIDIA Reflex keeping latency to a minimum.

For nearly all situations, the answer will be to turn DLSS on. DLSS leverages AI-specific hardware that isn’t used elsewhere during the frame rendering process, so turning it on isn’t taking resources from something else, and using it can bring serious gains in a game’s frame rate. That said, there are some caveats to that advice:

Frame saturation: If your graphics card already produces more frames per second than your monitor’s refresh rate at native resolution can support (say, 200 fps on a 144Hz monitor), turning DLSS won’t add much of a noticeable difference.

Image-quality tolerance: Nvidia’s new DLSS transformer models have effectively fixed the problems of earlier DLSS models that sometimes produced wonky visual artifacts or blurriness, but some users may still spot rare artefacts such as ghosting on fine wires or HUD elements.

Game support: While many of the latest PC games support DLSS, there are notable exceptions, like Starfield, and in my testing, some games work better with AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution. You’ll want to test both technologies (and possibly Intel XeSS), where available, to find the best results for your game and settings.

Mode choice: DLSS generally offers Quality, Balanced, Performance, and Ultra-Performance modes, with performance modes trading some visual quality for much higher FPS. My advice is to enable DLSS Quality mode first and evaluate your FPS. If you need more frames, move down to Balanced or Performance modes until you hit your target frame rate.

Yes—sometimes dramatically. Even without Frame Generation, which can be somewhat controversial among some users, DLSS can make games playable at resolutions and settings higher than recommended for a given graphics card. The 8GB VRAM in the RTX 4060 largely precludes its being able to effectively game at 1440p, but with DLSS, you largely can, especially if you stay away from intensive settings like ray tracing.

No. Every generation of GeForce RTX—from 20-series Turing cards onward—can run DLSS Super Resolution and Ray Reconstruction, provided the game supports them.

What was 40-series-exclusive at launch is Frame Generation (DLSS 3); that feature relies on the Optical Flow Accelerator introduced with the Ada Lovelace architecture, and so Nvidia RTX 20 and RTX 30 series cards cannot use it.

DLSS requires NVIDIA’s Tensor Cores, so it is limited to GeForce RTX GPUs (desktop, laptop, or cloud). Owners of AMD or Intel cards can use rival, open-standard alternatives—AMD FSR and Intel XeSS—but DLSS is strictly limited to Nvidia RTX cards.

DLSS 4's flagship feature, Multi-Frame Generation, is only available on Nvidia's new RTX 50-series graphics cards.

However, the underlying transformer AI model that sharpens Super Resolution and Ray Reconstruction can be enabled on earlier RTX cards through the NVIDIA App, so you still gain image-quality improvements, just not the three-for-one frame generation feature.