NVIDIA has confirmed that the first games, applications, and platforms that will be gaining support for NVIDIA DLSS 3.5 will be Alan Wake 2, Cyberpunk 2077, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, Portal with RTX, Chaos Vantage, D5 Render, and NVIDIA Omniverse. All of these titles are scheduled to get DLSS 3.5 later this fall. NVIDIA DLSS 3.5 is the first version of the technology to feature Ray Reconstruction, which, according to NVIDIA, “enhances ray traced image quality for all GeForce RTX GPUs by replacing hand-tuned denoisers with an NVIDIA supercomputer-trained AI network that generates higher-quality pixels in between sampled rays.”
First, a game engine generates the geometry and materials of a scene, all of which have physically based attributes that affect their appearance and how light interacts with them. A sample of rays are then shot from the camera’s viewpoint, determining the properties of light sources in a scene and how light reacts when it hits materials. For instance, if rays strike a mirror, reflections are generated.
However, shooting rays for every pixel on your screen is too computationally demanding, even for offline renderers that calculate scenes over the course of several minutes or hours. So instead, ray samples must be used – these fire a handful of rays at various points across the scene for a representative sample of the scene’s lighting, reflectivity and shadowing.