3DMark Port Royal gets DLSS support

UL Benchmarks, the performance-measuring company formerly known as Futuremark and before that MadOnion.com, has announced the release of an update to its ray tracing Port Royal benchmark which brings support for Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) anti-aliasing technology.

Announced late last year and released in January, UL Benchmarks' Port Royal adds the ability to quantify hardware-accelerated real-time hybrid ray tracing performance as a gaming workload. While the software technically implements Microsoft's vendor-agnostic DirectX Ray-Tracing (DXR) application programming interface (API), it relies on the presence of hardware ray tracing units - which, in the gaming sector at least, means for the moment that it's only able to run on systems with an Nvidia Turing-based RTX graphics card of some flavour or another.

While Port Royal's use of DXR means that as and when AMD adds ray tracing capabilities to its own hardware cross-vendor comparison will be possible, UL Benchmarks isn't against adding a few Nvidia-specific features too: The company has released an update to the benchmark which adds support for Nvidia's in-house Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) anti-aliasing technology.

Designed to make use of the otherwise-idle Tensor Core hardware of RTX graphics cards, originally developed for accelerating artificial intelligence tasks in workstation and server environments, DLSS is claimed to offer improved graphical quality and boosted performance over traditional alternatives including temporal anti-aliasing (TAA) - the technique used by the previous release of Port Royal.

Exclusive to Nvidia's RTX graphics cards, DLSS can now be toggled in Port Royal to offer a visual comparison while also testing out Nvidia's performance-boost claims. As with the previous Port Royal release, however, the benchmark is only available to paying customers of the 3DMark Advanced Edition release or above - which, UL Benchmarks has announced, is currently on sale for £3.44 via Steam and the company's own website. Those who already have Port Royal will receive the new update free of charge.