RTX and DLSS

Being an RTX card I also like checking out the performance of some of Nvidia’s features. Namely the ray tracing performance and the performance improvements you can see by using DLSS combined with the tensor cores. In most of the tests, I’m only comparing a few of the RTX cards as well as a GTX 1080 Ti for comparison. But in the 3DMark Port Royal test, I have been tracking ray tracing performance in all of the RTX cards as well as a few of the GTX cards introduced into the mix as well. Here the RTX 3060 XC Black was just a hair below a few of the overclocked RTX 2060 SUPERs and above the stock 2060 SUPER.

I then jumped into game tests, this time with the just recently released Watch Dogs: Legion. For this one, I wanted to get an idea of the performance you will see when taking advantage of Nvidia’s RTX and DLSS features. Here I tested with both on, just RTX on, and with neither on. With RTX on but no DLSS, the 3060 struggled at 14 FPS at 4k as tested. Turning DLSS on made a huge difference and doubled the frame rate to 28 FPS. This was even 1 FPS higher than testing without RTX or DLSS on at all.

Next, I wanted to check out the performance in Metro Exodus which I do our normal testing in as well. When testing at 4K with the ultra detail with RTX on the 3060 came in at 18 FPS. Turning DLSS on helped jump that up to 27.81. Having only DLSS on was even better at 32.11 but that wasn’t a significant jump over not having either on like normal. Overall though this tells us that RTX is demanding (shocked face) and that DLSS helps bring performance nearly back up to the same as without RTX.

With Wolfenstein: Youngblood I tested at 4K using their Mein Lenen! Detail setting which is the highest detail. I tested with RTX on and just compared running with DLSS on the balanced setting and with it off entirely. The RTX 3060 ended up performing similar to the RTX 2070 SUPER here which was impressive. Turning DLSS on made a significant difference here as well, taking the frame rate from playable but slow up to over 60 FPS and smooth.

Next, I tested using a benchmark based on the game Boundary. For this one, I wanted to see how all of the different DLSS settings would perform, including turning it off completely. At 4k the RTX 3060 was obviously out of its league here, but the jump from no DLSS up to the DLSS quality setting was big going from 9.4 to 17 FPS. DLSS balanced helped slightly but the jump up to the performance DLSS setting was nearly enough to make things playable on the 3060 which isn’t designed at all for 4k.

The last tests were done in a benchmark based on the game Bright Memory. Here I wanted to check out the performance difference between different RTX settings. Once again the RTX 3060 did struggle at 4k as expected, but it does let us see the performance difference between the different RTX settings. Each of the settings between very high, high, and normal were all 3 FPS difference between settings. But the RTX low has a much bigger gap with a 7 FPS difference between it and the RTX normal setting.