Since the announcement of the NVIDIA RTX capabilities DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) has been on of the most anticipated features. While we all knew ray tracing would have a huge performance impact we anticipated DLSS reclaiming a fair bit of that performance. But, until Metro Exodus launched DLSS had be held to a few benchmarks and tech demos and a single game, Final Fantasy XV. On February 15, 2019 Metro Exodus launched as the first title with full RTX support with ray traced global illumination and support for DLSS. Battlefield V has also received an update to support DLSS but due to time constraints on my end I have not gotten a chance to work with it personally.

As I was out of town most of that week and had a brief amount of time with Metro Exodus before launch to really explore DLSS I did have a chance to make a gameplay performance video to test it out. While playing I changed DLSS from off to on several times and took a few screenshots. While playing the super softening of the image was very apparent, the artifacts around the sun were more noticeable to me while playing. But after reviewing the screenshots and the final video I was able to notice the softening of the image. In the image below it's very evident on the vegetation and character model.

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Looking around it appeared others had noticed that too, and they weren't too thrilled about it. In come the memes; Doesn't Look Super Sharp, Vaseline, and more. But, that was the initial implementation and after seeing DLSS in action in Port Royal, I know that's a canned benchmark but the point still stands, I felt something was off. Evidently it was as Metro Exodus received an update that was said to improve DLSS and improve it did. Below we're including several screenshots taken in game with performance overlays included so that you can see scene for scene the performance change when running the game at 4K with DLSS on vs off (Ultra settings, Hairworks and PhysX enabled). One thing to take away here is that first impressions are hard to shake, but sometimes deserve a second look once ironed out. Let us know down in the comment section if this changes your mind on what is possible with DLSS because clearly it can improve and with the click of a button you can get comparable image quality with healthy performance gains.

Note on the images below: Because of the nature of the time and weather changes in the game there are differences in lighting in each shot, so take that into account when you are pixel peeping through them. Enjoy.