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. The RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition is slightly ahead of the 2080 Ti here with the RX 6800 XT the next up. The 3070 Ti saw a 10.7% performance improvement compared to the original RTX 3070 as well.

Next, I wanted to check out the performance in Metro Exodus which I do our normal testing in as well. Here we can get a look at the performance of the always popular Metro Exodus with and without both DLSS and RTX. Running just RTX was playable at 32.31 FPS but you can see just how much of a hit it was compared to the nothing on number that is our normal 4K Ultra detail test at 52.26. But you can still enjoy RTX when you turn DLSS on with that jumping up to 48.56 FPS. Or running DLSS on its own is a great way to take the 4K Ultra performance up to over 60 FPS.

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. Overall this test shows how much of an improvement DLSS can get you in Wolfenstein: Youngblood especially when adding RTX into the mix. For the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition, it went from 73 FPS which is solid up to 116 FPS which is close to the 120+ high refresh rate monitors.

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. Here like all of the other cards the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition struggled with DLSS turned off. But Running DLSS performance or balanced was enough to edge the performance up over 30 FPS to make it playable without even getting into detail settings at all.

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. All of the settings still had the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition in the 30-59 range but the RTX low does make a big performance difference. From there you can tweak the ray tracing performance up and down but with the RTX 3070 Ti Founders Edition, I think I would stick with the very high for the best detail while still staying over 30 FPS or go with low and get it up to 51 to smooth things out.