If you have a laptop for gaming, do the following exercise: unplug it from the mains and start a game. It’s unplayable. Laptop manufacturers voluntarily limit the performance of their machines on battery power to avoid displaying ridiculous autonomy. This is where DLSS comes in.
The issue around graphics cards is not only hardware, it is also software. The battle that is being played out between Nvidia and AMD, but also Intel, is also fascinating to follow. Nvidia is the precursor of consumer super-sampling technologies with DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), AMD offers FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution), as for Intel, they call it XSS (Xe Super Sampling).
Today’s laptops lose performance when unplugged. A problem that Apple likes to point out in its conferences, since its MacBooks under ARM are spared. Technologies like DLSS could help manufacturers solve this problem.
What is supersampling technology?
It’s called super-sampling technology, but it can also be called spatial scaling engines. This type of technology has been around for a very long time, most Full HD and 4K televisions have it. The idea of super-sampling technology is to reduce the strain on your GPU by rendering the original image at a lower definition and then using artificial intelligence to increase that image to give the illusion that it was created at a higher definition.
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Imagine playing a visually stunning AAA title at maximum settings on a 4K display, but the game is actually running in Full HD and then being AI-upscaled to 4K using this technology . The images will then be more detailed and this also means that the game can run faster and smoother, allowing you to make significant gains in terms of the number of images displayed, without the graphical effects suffering. . The artificial intelligence used by this technology basically adds the extra pixels.
Apparently, this is a huge challenge, since you have to generate hundreds of frames per second without players noticing this treatment. But, it would be wrong to mix technologies on the market, the solutions of Nvidia, AMD and Intel are very different.
The technologies turn out to be different
There are as many recipes as there are software publishers to try to erase the defects and in particular the staircase effect that occurs with this practice or any inconsistencies in the image. In case you need a brief explanation: Spatial scaling techniques, like AMD FSR 1.0, run each video frame in your game one at a time through an algorithm – and they don’t require a special GPU. to work.
Nvidia’s DLSS, on the other hand, is a time-scaling technique that compares multiple frames and takes into account how things are moving in a video game scene, and processes it all using a network of neurons that runs exclusively on Tensor cores that you can only find in an Nvidia RTX GPU. In other words: DLSS requires dedicated hardware acceleration while FSR 1.0 aims for broader compatibility. AMD’s FSR 2.0 and Intel’s XeSS work on the same principle as DLSS.
Is DLSS eco-friendly?
The idea here is not to show that DLSS makes it possible to increase the number of frames per second displayed on the screen or the quality of renderings… DLSS sometimes offers a better image than native rendering, Nvidia has d elsewhere created its own tool to compare renderings. ICAT is an (obviously) childish Windows program that helps you view a stack of screenshots, gameplay, and even recorded video side-by-side. Automatically aligning images and ensuring you can smoothly pan each scene, zoom in and out, all of those images or videos simultaneously.
Frames per second or image quality isn’t the only metric by which to gauge the performance of Nvidia’s technology. Efficiency, or how well the hardware performs given the power, is another way to rate laptop hardware.
Since the resources of laptops are shared, and the whole thing is simultaneously influenced by the GPU as well as the CPU, we can add up their power consumption to get the total processor power (TPP). To calculate efficiency, simply divide the number of frames per second by the total power of the processor.
This is a very interesting analysis, because on a laptop, efficiency is a particularly perceptible issue to better understand heating and overall consumption. The less power the laptop requires to perform its tasks, the less it will heat up and the less energy it will consume. We conducted the experiment on the Razer Blade 17 (Intel Core i7-12800H, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti as well as 32 GB of RAM) mainly around the Cyberpunk 2077 game.
Note that we could do the same exercise on other AAA games, such as Doom Eternal, Gof Of War, Call Of Duty: Vanguard… as long as the game is DLSS compatible.
DLSS offers four levels of detail: Quality, Balanced, Performance, and Ultra Performance. We ran our tests by disabling DLSS and then setting it to balanced and ultra performance. Of course, this has a slight impact on the graphics quality. While in mode ” Quality“, there is often no difference to the native definition with the naked eye, small losses in graphics quality can be observed in balanced mode and slightly larger losses in performance mode. In most cases, however, the differences can only be seen if you look very closely at certain areas of the screen.
| Fashion | Definition | Average FPS | CPU + GPU (W) | Efficiency (FPS/W) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DLSS Off | 1440p | 24 | 183 | 0.13 |
| Balanced DLSS | 1440p | 56 | 188 | 0.29 |
| DLSS Ultra Performance | 1440p | 75 | 192 | 0.39 |
| DLSS Ultra Performance with limited FPS | 1440p | 40 (limited) | 142 | 0.29 |
What we observe here is that the laptop consumes a little more energy for a significantly higher performance. If you have fun limiting the number of FPS displayed, the overall consumption decreases… the performance is therefore better!
DLSS is good for battery life
In other words: if you don’t need extreme FPS, because you don’t have a screen that reads hundreds of hertz, you can at least save some power with DLSS . This means that this type of technology is environmentally efficient.
Subsequently, DLSS could be a valuable weapon for creating mobile, high-performance and autonomous machines. We obviously think of the Nintendo Switch which uses an Nvidia chip. But, we also think of laptops. Today, their performance is hampered when they are disconnected from the mains. Thus, we conducted tests, under the same conditions, by unplugging the Razer laptop with the default settings and despite the DLSS activated: the number of FPS drops to 8, the game is unplayable. So there is still some work needed to optimize performance on battery power using DLSS. We also think of the Steam Deck, which has been criticized for its battery performance.
So let’s hope that DLSS will make it possible, in the future, to play and work on the move without sacrificing the performance of our machines. Then, why not, to also do better than the efficiency of Apple’s ARM chips.
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