I did not get as deep into The Lord of the Rings: Gollum as our reviewist Rachel, however I do share her view that it’s not A Good Recreation. Actually, I’ve had about as a lot enjoyable with it as I’d on a spa day within the Barad-dûr sulfur pits. Between the soulless platforming, undercooked stealth, tedious storytelling, and framerate stuttering so unhealthy it’s obtained me killed twice, Gollum is perilously quick on likeable qualities. Particularly in the event you’re not into LOTR lore, or high quality hattery.
In my unclad head, then, Gollum’s spotlight up to now has been DLSS 3. It’s considered one of just some dozen video games to assist the latest, most artificially clever model of Nvidia’s deep learning-powered upscaler, and admittedly makes a really compelling argument for switching it on. Graphics card permitting, clearly.
DLSS 3 differs from the way more broadly obtainable DLSS 2 in a few methods. First, it contains an non-obligatory body era characteristic, which harnesses the more and more misused energy of AI for the altogether extra harmless function of elevating framerates in video games. It does this by fairly actually producing entire new frames, utilizing information from earlier, historically rendered ones, then slotting them in between these rendered frames. Smoother visuals, no additional GPU pressure.
The second is that it solely at the moment works on Nvidia RTX 40 collection playing cards, just like the just-released RTX 4060 Ti. I hope it may possibly ultimately unfold out to a minimum of older GeForce GPUs, as a result of as Gollum reveals, body era can allow you to crank up a recreation’s different high quality settings whereas coping with the choppiness that this could in any other case impose.
Under are some benchmark outcomes I recorded on an RTX 4070 Ti (with the RPS take a look at rig’s typical Intel Core i5-11600K and 16GB of DDR4 RAM). At 1440p, this card can coax an honest common framerate out of Gollum’s Epic high quality settings, full with maxed-out hair simulation (??!?), and it will seem that including ray traced reflections wasn’t sufficient to render it completely unplayable. Nonetheless, 69fps to 41fps is an enormous, simply seen drop, and enabling ray tracing does exacerbate Gollum’s moments of stuttering and slowdown.
DLSS upscaling, by itself, will help out a bit however nonetheless doesn’t totally refund ray tracing’s FPS price. Throw within the AI-generated frames, although, and efficiency rockets upwards, greater than doubling what the RTX 4070 Ti can do at native decision.
DLSS 3 is much more efficient at 4K. This time, the RTX 4070 Ti merely couldn’t deal with ray tracing with out upscaling assist, however with DLSS in Efficiency mode it was in a position to outspeed native non-RT efficiency. Body era then took Gollum up previous the 60fps barrier, with Efficiency-level upscaling averaging the very best at 82fps. That’s six instances the typical FPS of native, ray traced 4K.
Crucially, DLSS 3’s body era additionally soothes Gollum’s stuttering. Not within the sense of fixing it – FPS drops will occur no matter settings – however by maintaining these occasional FPS low factors nonetheless pretty excessive, every time there’s slowdown, it’s simpler to disregard. A fall from 100fps to 70fps isn’t wherever close to as distracting as one from 60fps to 12fps, and also you received’t really feel the previous in any respect in case your monitor is a bathroom normal 60Hz.
A extra frowny-faced studying of this might be that I’m praising a mechanism for glossing over efficiency issues that ought to by no means have been there within the first place. Which I suppose I’m, however then if the workaround is true there within the menu, and it nonetheless appears to be like roughly pretty much as good as native decision, and doesn’t even actually undergo from the added system latency that body interpolation causes, then certainly there’s nowt mistaken with utilizing it.
The actual downside right here is that so few Gollum gamers will truly be capable of; as productive as DLSS 3 is, it’s nonetheless restricted to a tiny fingerful of graphics playing cards, and largely moderately costly ones at that. Cheaper fashions just like the RTX 4060 Ti and the upcoming RTX 4060 might due to this fact be much more important launches, within the grand outdated GPU scheme, than earlier Nvidia mid-rangers, as they’ll be making this tech much more attainable. AMD’s FSR 3 might additionally make for a helpful mixture of upscaling and body interpolation, although we haven’t seen this in motion or heard when it’s launching.