Nvidia has announced the DLSS 3.5 release date, and it’s not far away. The new iteration of Team Green’s upscaling technology will arrive on the day of the 2.0 patch for the somewhat maligned, but nonetheless stunning title Cyberpunk 2077. The game’s 2.0 patch drops on September 21, and DLSS 3.5 will be available at the same time.
DLSS 3.5 release date
So the DLSS 3.5 launch date is September 21, coinciding with the update to Cyberpunk 2.0. But it’s also, handily, ahead of the September 26th release date of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty – the latest addition from CD Projekt Red. The launch announcement by Nvidia initially came at Gamescom, so the wait hasn’t been too lengthy.
DLSS 3.5 explained
Between DLSS 2, 3, and 3.5, it’s easy to get a little turned around on what’s available from the technology. Should you need a refresh, our guide to DLSS 3 is here. Below we’ll briefly detail what the new 3.5 features are, and why they’re interesting. First things first though, DLSS 3.5 will be available for all Nvidia RTX graphics cards. So no need to stump up for an RTX 40-series GPU specifically.
Ray Reconstruction
DLSS is largely concerned with ray tracing, using AI and deep learning to improve and sharpen images without exhausting your GPU. Doing so delivers more frames and improved gameplay. But ray reconstruction improves this further and seeks to remove artifacts observed in some ray-traced titles. So while frame rates are important, so too is image quality.
The long and short of it is that ‘hand-tuned denoisers’ (not a musical accessory) fill in missing pixels during ray tracing. However, they can cause ghosting and other issues explained in Nvidia’s somewhat technical deep-dive on DLSS 3.5. What DLS 3.5 offers is a shift away from these manually tuned denoisers.
The shift is then toward an “NVIDIA supercomputer-trained AI network” to generate “higher quality pixels”. And Nvidia is pretty good at AI, as shown by the Grace Hopper superchip.
What about AMD?
Well AMD has FSR 3 and that is worth looking at. But when it comes to AI in graphics, Nvidia has the lead. If you’re after the best performance from Cyberpunk 2077, or other games that will use DLSS 3.5 (Alan Wake 2, Lies of P, Party Animals, Chaos Vantage, and Portal with RTX), DLSS 3.5 may be the way to go.
Of course Nvidia Omniverse, the company’s own dev platform, supports it too.
Is RTX 30-series getting DLS 3.5?
Yes. Nvidia has announced that all RTX graphics cards will be able to utilize DLSS 3.5, and that includes the current last-gen 30-series cards.
