Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070: DLSS performance analysis

Nvidia's Turing architecture has a big bunch of new features - ray tracing being the key new technology - but the inclusion of the Turing architecture's tensor cores also opens the door to the GPU carrying out different kinds of workloads, with potentially game-changing implications for gaming performance. Put simply, deep Learning Super-Sampling - DLSS - has the potential to turn the RTX 2070 from a 1440p champion into a 4K contender.

And that's perhaps not surprising, bearing in mind that in the two demos we have to play with, a source 1440p image is put through Nvidia's deep learning algorithm and reconstructed to a 4K output. You can read our full analysis here and get a better idea of how the quality compares, but the upshot is that DLSS slots fairly effortlessly into games that support temporal anti-aliasing, which accounts for virtually every modern game engine out there. Around 28 titles have been announced with DLSS support, some of which - like Io Interactive's Hitman 2 - also incorporate ray tracing features as well.

When analysing the Epic Infiltrator and Final Fantasy 15 demos with the higher-end RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti, there was anything up to a 40 per cent improvement in performance compared to the same demos running with standard TAA. Going into our RTX 2070 tests, I wondered if we'd see the same performance uplift, or whether DLSS performance improvements may be less dramatic owing to the reduced amount of tensor cores in the TU106 processor. Well, the numbers are now in - and they're looking impressive. Note that all tests here were carried out on a Z390-based motherboard paired with a Core i7 8700K running with a 4.7GHz all-core turbo, paired with 16GB of 3400MHz DDR4, while all RTX cards are set to Founders Edition clock-speeds.

[4K] Nvidia RTX DLSS Analysis: AI Tech Boosts Performance by 40% - But What About Image Quality?

Final Fantasy 15

First up, a word of warning about this demo. It's based on the standalone benchmark Square-Enix released prior to the game shipping, and overall performance is jerky and sub-optimal - possibly because a ton of GameWorks technologies are layered one on top of the other. We've chosen three excerpts from the benchmark that are mostly stutter-free for our testing. All of the RTX cards deliver a 37 per cent to 39 per cent performance improvements when comparing the same content between standard TAA and Turing's DLSS. The RTX 2070 provides just as much of a boost to frame-rate in percentage terms as the RTX 2080 Ti, suggesting that the pared back tensor core allocation in the new card has little to no impact on the potency of the DLSS technology.

Epic Infiltrator Demo

The Epic Infiltrator demo is essentially a showcase for the features of Unreal Engine 4 - a technology that is deployed in many modern games. Its anti-aliasing solution is one of the better TAA implementations we've seen, and so DLSS quality isn't quite as impressive in comparison to Final Fantasy 15, where DLSS actually manages to look better in many cases. Both RTX 2070 and RTX 2080 deliver a brilliant 42 per cent improvement to performance here, so well worth the very small impact to overall visual quality. Again, the lower allocation of tensor cores in the TU106 chip found in RTX 2070 has zero impact on DLSS performance. Indeed, RTX 2070 with DLSS enabled is only five per cent slower than the RTX 2080 Ti running with standard TAA, while also delivering a 68 per cent lead over GTX 1080 - its nearest Pascal competitor.

The fact we only have demo software to look at is problematic - we should really be testing final games. However, DLSS is a slot-in replacement for a game's TAA solution, and with Final Fantasy 15 in particular, we are looking at actual game code - albeit repurposed into a non-interactive benchmark. My concern with DLSS isn't actually about performance as such, it's more about how image quality holds up outside of canned, repeatable sequences. We'll be looking at DLSS in more depth as soon as actual interactive software is available, but let's just say that we're cautiously optimistic about this one.

Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Analysis

• Introduction, Hardware Breakdown
• DLSS - Deep Learning Super-Sampling: Performance Analysis [This Page]
• Assassin's Creed Unity, Battlefield 1, Crysis 3, Far Cry Primal - Rasterisation Analysis Part 1
• Ghost Recon Wildlands, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, The Witcher 3, Wolfenstein 2 - Rasterisation Analysis Part 2
• Which version to buy? Reference clocks vs Founders Edition vs Gaming-Z
• GeForce RTX 2070 - the Digital Foundry verdict