NVIDIA’s DLSS 3.5 makes ray traced games look better with AI

Last year, NVIDIA unveiled DLSS 3 with frame interpolation, which used its AI-driven rendering accelerator to add extra frames to games. Now at Gamescom it’s introducing DLSS 3.5, which adds Ray Reconstruction, a new feature that will use the company’s neural network to improve the quality of ray traced images. It’ll be available for all RTX GPUs—unlike DLSS 3’s frame interpolation, which only works with RTX 40-series cards.

NVIDIA says Ray Reconstruction will replace “hand-tuned denoisers with an NVIDIA supercomputer-trained AI network that generates higher-quality pixels in between sampled rays.” That’s similar to NVIDIA’s original pitch for DLSS — making low-res textures look better thanks to AI — and it could potentially lead to better ray tracing performance as well. In images shown to media, Ray Reconstruction appears to deliver sharper reflections and textures in supported titles. (See comparisons below.)

According to the company, Cyberpunk 2077 in Overdrive Mode (its most powerful ray tracing offering) hit 108 fps with DLSS 3.5 and Ray Reconstruction, while the same system reached 100fps with DLSS 3 alone, 63fps with DLSS 2 (which lacks Frame Generation) and 20fps without any DLSS help.

Just like previous DLSS releases, developers will have to manually implement support for Ray Reconstruction. Cyberpunk 2077 (and its expansion Phantom Liberty) will be the first DLSS 3.5 title in September, followed by Portal RTX and Alan Wake 2. NVIDIA will be showing off Ray Reconstruction at Gamescom this week, and hopefully we’ll get a look ourselves sometime soon.