Inside Unreal: How to use Nvidia DLSS in Unreal Engine

[Mippithedork]

@REC

I do have a few things to add but it may not be the answer you’re looking for. As with all things in games or realtime rendering, context usage of your content does matter. If say you were doing some very subtle DOF in your realtime cinematics maybe force it to switch to DLSS Quality mode during the cinematic. Or perhaps don’t use DLSS in certain cinematics (since you can turn it on and off when you want) and use it for everything else.

Here’s a question to ask yourself: How many scenes need DOF to look a very particular way, vs how many scenes would benefit from the framerate boost? It’s totally going to depend on your project and what’s important to you. Some games would say this is an easy choice, they barely make use of DOF and the fps boost is an easy win. Some projects won’t mind the changes in DOF behavior, DLSS works fine for them. But yeah some projects might say DLSS doesn’t work for this reason. DLSS has to fit into the current rendering pipeline for Unreal Engine 4 so this is a limitation of where technology is at right now.

Now it is true also that if you are a coder with access to the source, you can change some fundamentals about how and where postprocess effects work. I think experts in this area will tell you that can cause new problems however, and will probably also harm the performance benefits of DLSS. So this is not necessarily an easy win, but it is worth thinking about if you have those resources.

So the good news is that since we’ve identified the issue and are starting to understand it, we can take steps to improving and fixing it. DLSS is not done yet, the current shipping plugin of v2.1.5 will not be the last version. And of course software is generally improving in this area, especially as we continue to understand the issues.

Thanks for tuning in! I really wish I had a better answer on this today.

Thank you, this is a great answer, unfortunately for the project, it’s an arena combat fighter, and the DOF was used to take away focus from the background set dressing and let players focus mainly on the combat within the arena, our current solution is with subtle DOF, that being said, we really want to include DLSS, so we will get creative with other solutions that solve our underlying problem, so we can still use DLSS, but perhaps maybe not use DOF for our solution. Looking forward to the future updates and improvements on the tech and implementation in UE4, and hope to see you back on another stream in the near future. Thank you for your response.