Nvidia's DLSS tech is now available in VR, including No Man's Sky
The first VR DLSS games have arrived
VR fans with Nvidia RTX graphics cards can now enjoy the benefits of Nvidia's performance-boosting DLSS tech in some of today's best VR games, thanks to a swathe of new features included in today's GeForce Game Ready driver update. No Man's Sky, mechanic simulator Wrench and survival shooter Into The Radius are the first three VR games to support DLSS, with Nvidia claiming you'll be able to get double the performance in No Man's Sky on Ultra settings to help you maintain a smooth 90fps on an Oculus Quest 2 with an RTX 3080.
It's not just the VR version of No Man's Sky that's getting DLSS support, either. From today, the desktop version of Hello Games' procedurally generated space adventure will also be getting DLSS support, giving players a performance boost of up to 70% when playing at 4K, according to Nvidia.
By their count, this should mean that even RTX 2060 owners will be able to hit an average of 57fps on max settings at 4K with DLSS set to 'Performance mode' once you've downloaded the game's latest update, which is a damn sight better than their previous average of just 28fps with the same set of settings without DLSS. I should point out that their test rig also had an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X CPU and 32GB of RAM in it, but even if your own PC doesn't quite match up to Nvidia's test spec, why not try it out for yourself to see what your PC can handle? Take a look at the video below to see it in action.
DLSS support will also be welcome news for Wrench players, too, with Nvidia claiming a performance boost of up to 80% in VR here, and double performance at 4K on desktop. It should also help maintain smooth frame rates for its newly-added ray tracing support as well, which is being added to the game today in the same update. Like No Man's Sky, ray tracing and DLSS will also be available on the desktop version of Wrench, and you can take a look at some of the improvements in their new trailer.
Nvidia weren't quite as forthcoming about the performance improvements players will see in VR survival shooter Into The Radius on their GeForce blog post, but said that VR players will see "a noticeable improvement to anti-aliasing, which greatly reduces shimmering and stair-stepping on objects and foliage".
There are several more non-VR PC games getting DLSS support today, too, including Everspace 2, Scavengers, and action adventure RPG Aron's Adventure, as well as retro FPS Amid Evil, the latter of which is finally getting its long-awaited ray tracing update today as well. Finally, Redout: Space Assault is also getting the ray tracing and DLSS double whammy treatment today as well.
With today's update, that brings the total number of DLSS games to over 50, according to Nvidia - a number that might be worth celebrating if anyone could actually buy an RTX graphics card at a reasonable price right now. Alas, RTX cards still remain almost impossible to find in the shops at the moment, and will likely continue to be in short supply until 2022. Still, I'm glad more games are getting support for DLSS and ray tracing regardless, and hopefully by the time graphics card availability gets back to normal, there will be an even healthier supply of supported games out there to really show them off with.