Sitting down with Tony Tamasi, Senior Vice President of Tech Marketing at NVIDIA, to talk about DLSS, ray-tracing, AI, innovation, and where the future is headed. Pull up a chair, this is a big one!

A snippet.

“When we made that leap to ray-tracing, without DLSS it was impractical,” Tony Tamasi tells me. “There just wasn't enough performance to really do what people wanted. You could turn maybe a single ray-tracing effect on, but at that point it’s not that big of a difference. Whereas when you look at something like Control, when you turn everything on it looks radically different.”

---

“When we made that leap to ray-tracing, without DLSS it was impractical. There just wasn't enough performance to really do what people wanted."

---

That note about turning everything on was born from NVIDIA’s long-standing relationship with game developers -- it knew there was a desire for high-quality realistic in-game shadows, reflections, and things like Global Illumination (GI). All things that would make the interactive worlds we visit day-to-day feel more realistic and immersive. And it’s only when you combine multiple ray-tracing effects that the, well, effect begins to look like a true glimpse into the future.

Case in point, Cyberpunk 2077’s setting of Night City looks incredible with all RTX effects enabled.



“But, turning everything on means it all runs radically slower,” Tony Tamasi continues. “We needed another kind of generational leap, and that's what DLSS gives you. An architectural leap is oftentimes one and a half to two times the performance. DLSS brings another generation in terms of capability. It makes the impractical, practical. Without DLSS, I'm not sure that we'd have the momentum behind ray-tracing that we have today.”

Head Here For Our Full Interview and Deep Dive Into All Things Graphics with NVIDIA