A little over two years have passed since the release of CDProjekt Red’s science fiction epic, and at this point most people agree that the game is mostly complete. At launch, Cyberpunk 2077 was riddled with bugs and had poor framerates, but the developer has been hard at work fixing these problems. The current patch adds compatibility with Nvidia DLSS3, which, when used in conjunction with modern GeForce graphics cards, may significantly increase frame rates even when demanding effects are enabled.

Deep Learning Super Sampling, for the uninformed, is an acronym for “Deep Learning.” There are hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of visual analysis put into each game using this method. It is possible for games to implement demanding effects like ray tracing with little impact on framerates by combining deep neural network computation with dedicated cores on RTX GPUs.

In our RTX 4090 review, we were able to test how DLSS 3 performed on early releases of Cyberpunk 2077; using Nvidia’s new “Frame Generation” technology, which inserts a completely AI-generated frame in between every GPU-generated frame to accelerate total frame rates, DLSS 3 is especially outstanding. By using DLSS 3, the frame rate of a game may be increased by a factor of three to four when using a high resolution and RTX-branded ray tracing effects.

DLSS 3 made a massive difference to Cyberpunk’s performance in our testing. (RT = ray tracing.)

It will, however, need very powerful gear in order to be fully exploited. It’s exclusive to the RTX 40-series cards; although earlier cards could see some gains with DLSS 1.0 or 2.0, they won’t be nearly as significant.