However, there’s a second trade off that is talked about less: noise.
All of these problems end up hurting what is supposed to be a technology that improves visual quality.
What is Ray Reconstruction?
Partly acknowledging this, Nvidia launchedDLSS Ray Reconstructionback in 2023 to address many of these issues.
Nvidia has now updated Ray Reconstruction as part of itsDLSS 4technology suite.
The DLSS 4 version replaces the old convolutional neural web connection (CNN) with a newtransformer model.
Essentially, this is a larger, higher-quality AI model with further tuning to improve denoising quality.
Does this updated version address many of my complaints about ray tracing noise?
Well, it’s time to find out.
Like other DLSS 4 technologies, there are two ways to access DLSS 4 Ray Reconstruction.
Outside of this, third-party tools likeDLSS SwapperandDLSS Updatercan upgrade DLSS 3 games to DLSS 4.
This allows us to isolate the impact of Ray Reconstruction improvements.
The examples in this video were captured at 4K using aGeForce RTX 5090.
DLSS 4 Ray Reconstruction Image Quality
Let’s start with the good stuff.
DLSS 4 Ray Reconstruction is a significant improvement in stability.
It’s not 100% free of this artifact but is significantly reduced.
In fact, in other areas of the image, stability improves to near-perfect levels.
This is especially noticeable on some globally illuminated surfaces, where DLSS 4 Ray Reconstruction brings a significant improvement.
The new version is cleaner in motion and resolves a decent level of detail more quickly.
And keep in mind, this is denoising, not upscaling, which remains the same in both examples.
At times, this increase in stability combines with better denoising to produce higher-resolution reflections.
Again, this is ghosting because of denoising, not upscaling.
In these cases, Ray Reconstruction prioritized smoothing noise over preserving textures, leading to blurry, muddy surfaces.
In many instances, DLSS 4 is a major improvement in this area.
Similar benefits can be seen on various surfaces throughout the game.
The Downsides of Ray Reconstruction
DLSS 4 Ray Reconstruction isn’t perfect though.
In Star Wars Outlaws, stationary ray-traced effects sometimes display a grid pattern.
A similar issue appears in Cyberpunk 2077, though less frequently, usually in globally illuminated areas.
We also noticed some cases where DLSS 4 Ray Reconstruction reduced texture quality, separate from the previous issue.
However, some tweaks to the model are necessary to ensure texture quality is consistently preserved along with denoising.
But when there are changes, achieving similar detail levels becomes much harder.
Still, we would have liked to see more improvements in this area.
This still causes issues in games that don’t use a particularly high ray count for ray tracing.
So this pet peeve we have with the responsiveness of ray-traced lighting persists even with DLSS 4 Ray Reconstruction.
Performance Testing
As for performance, DLSS 4 Ray Reconstruction is more taxing thanDLSS 3 Ray Reconstruction.
For each GPU, we adjusted the prefs to something realistically playable while maintaining a similar output frame rate.
So, not an insignificant impact, but quite worthwhile given the image quality is generally much better.
TheRTX 4070 Superis less powerful and uses the previous-generation Ada Lovelace architecture.
The main difference here is the architecture.
As for Turing with theRTX 2080 Ti, this GPU is really only suitable for low-quality ray tracing today.
We had to dial back the parameters to 1080p with DLSS Quality and the lowest quality parameters.
The new transformer model generally results in a significant increase in visual quality.
We do have a couple of recommendations for game developers based on this testing.
First, if you’re developing a ray-traced game, consider integrating DLSS 4 Ray Reconstruction.
Second, we recommend allowing gamers to choose the model used for upscaling and ray reconstruction separately.
