Unity is buying Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital to help prepare for the metaverse
Unity will add native NVIDIA DLSS support to its game engine
The tech boost performance and visual acuity in games with little work needed for developers.
Unity, one of the biggest game engines around, will soon offer support for NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) tech. It should be available to Unity developers by the end of this year, allowing them to switch on DLSS in their games in just a few clicks. Unreal Engine also has DLSS support via a plugin that Epic Games rolled out this year.
DLSS is a type of upscaling that both boosts performance and improves how games look. It uses AI-powered antialiasing to display images that are similar to native resolution quality (and sometimes even better than that), even though systems only actually render a fraction of the pixels. It lightens the load on hardware while allowing for better-looking games. In addition, DLSS boosts performance for rasterized graphics.
The tech is often used alongside ray-traced reflections to produce realistic-looking environments at high resolutions and frame rates on NVIDIA’s recent GTX graphics cards.
Nintendo’s rumored Switch Pro (or Super Switch or whatever it’ll be called) is expected to support DLSS as well. While the next Switch should be more powerful than the current models, it won’t have quite as much muscle as a PlayStation 5 or Xbox Series X/S. Expanded support for DLSS on the engine side should lead to better performance in more games, which should come in handy for the Switch Pro, especially given that it’s likely to support 4K gameplay while in docked mode.
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