JUNE 2020 PCWorld 73free. Path tracing kneecaps your graphics
card’s performance, though Nvidia’s
wonderful DLSS 2.0 technology scrapes a lot
of it back. DLSS renders a scene at a lower
resolution—like 1440p if you’re on a 4K
screen—and then upscale the visuals using
the machine learning capabilities of the
dedicated tensor cores inside of GeForce RTX
20-series graphics cards. The first iteration of
DLSS disappointed, but this new version
works much better, greatly increasing frame
rates with virtually no loss in visual fidelity
despite the upscaling. It’s great.
While some games let you choose
between Quality, Performance, or Balanced
presets to adjust the aggressiveness of DLSS
2.0’s upscaling, Minecraft automatically selects
settings for you depending on your resolution.
If you’re playing at the less-strenuous 1080p
resolution, for instance, it’ll run the Quality
preset (2x) upscaling, whereas if you play at
4K, it’ll use Performance mode (4x upscaling
from 1080p to 4K
resolution). It all
looks good,
though. You can
only run DLSS 2.0
(or “Upscaling,”
as it’s called in
Minecraft’s menu)
if you have ray
tracing active as
well. You can’t run
it alone for a frame
rate boost in
traditional
Minecraft
worlds—not that
traditional
Minecraft worlds
need a
performance
boost on most
PCs, anyway.
I toyedRTX on.RTX off.