DLSS is going mainstream: NVIDIA's DLSS 2.0 tech is now available as a plugin on the Unreal marketplace

NVIDIA recently launched a DLSS plugin on the Unreal Marketplace. With this, developers with games built on the Unreal engine should be able to easily integrate NVIDIA's AI-based resolution upscaling technology through a minor update. 

While DLSS 1.0 was supported in just 8 games and was criticized for poor performance and image quality, DLSS 2.0 features better-than-native image quality at times with a significant performance boost. While it features in 35 games, actually implementing DLSS was a non-trivial exercise until now. 

What's interesting is that with this move, NVIDIA appears to be at least partially delinking DLSS from ray-tracing. DLSS was built originally to offset the extreme performance hit of ray-tracing effects, without compromising image quality. However, with the exception of a handful of titles like Ghostrunner, most Unreal engine games do not leverage ray-tracing.

This means future DLSS 2.0 updates based on the Marketplace plugin would place emphasis on performance. In quality mode, DLSS 2.0 often looks better than native resolution rendering: this means gamers on Ampere and Turing RTX cards could benefit from what amounts to a significant free performance boost. 

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