Did Nvidia just crack the ray-tracing puzzle? DLSS 2.0 delivers better than native image quality in Control

Control, Remedy's interdimensional ray-traced shooter, just received support for Nvidia's massively overhauled DLSS 2.0 AI upscaling algorithm. Hardware Times captured side by side images comparing native rendering with DLSS 2.0, and the results are incredible.

Upscaled DLSS 2.0 captures actually exceed native resolution image quality. With the latest update, Nvidia appears to have finally delivered on the DLSS promise it made when Turing launched: better performance without a massive hit to image quality. Control's DLSS 2.0 implementation also cements DLSS' position as a superior alternative to contrast aware sharpening.

The implications here are tremendous. With the COVID-19 pandemic getting worse by the day, we're almost certainly not going to see Ampere launch anytime soon: with the whole world in lockdown, where would Nvidia ships the chips? Instead, DLSS 2.0 implemented at the driver level-meaning universal support for games-would effectively deliver a free 40-70 percent performance boost to all Nvidia Turing users. This means that ray-tracing in-game could finally be a possibility without an excessive hit to image quality. 

RTX 2070 Super users, for instance, would get RTX 2080 Ti-level framerates without compromising on image quality. While Control's DLSS 2.0 implementation is stunning, we won't know for sure if these are typical results until Nvidia rolls out a driver update with universal DLSS 2.0 support. We will keep you posted.