Rockstar’s crowning achievement – Red Dead Redemption 2, and its accompanying multi-player component Red Dead Online – will soon receive support for the latest iteration of NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS).

It’s dropping on July 13th, as part of the substantial summer content update Blood Money.

Even though Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn’t feature any ray tracing flourishes, it firmly retains a top spot as one of the most graphically impressive games, despite originally debuting on aging last-gen consoles.

2019’s eventual PC port pushed the fidelity options to unprecedented levels, bringing countless set-ups to their knees.

The dedicated ‘advanced’ menu let you render distances to frankly excessive levels – you could not pick out when individual blades of grass stopped rendering.

The options menu was clearly intended for future proofing the game for unreleased hardware, producing a pristine, practically flawless presentation.

What if you could run these settings, on today’s hardware? That’s where DLSS comes in.

What’s DLSS?

Powered by machine learning, DLSS leverages dedicated AI co-processors developed by NVIDIA to smartly upscale your games from a lower internal resolution producing comparable results to native rendering.

The results are overwhelmingly impressive. DLSS can convincingly upscale from a bog-standard 1080P to a crispy 4K image. For gamers, it essentially means double the performance is most cases.

Rather than running the resource-intensive native 4K, use DLSS to achieve a 4K-like image and use the left over horsepower to push graphical options to the max.

It was long rumoured DLSS would be coming to the Switch’s successor, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Higher image quality

DLSS is a much-welcomed addition, as the game’s current anti-aliasing options, for cleaning up distracting stair-step jaggies, are suboptimal.

Red Dead Redemption 2 uses temporal anti-aliasing. This technique is quickly becoming the go-to solution for modern game engines to eliminates pesky jaggies. However, it comes at the cost of a softer presentation and ghostly trails behind objects.

Falling back to the game’s other anti-aliasing options (like FXAA and MSAA) results in awkward sub-pixel shimming on fine details like strands of hair and distant foliage.

DLSS is essentially a more advanced version of temporal anti-aliasing and should, hopefully, clear up the image significantly. It’ll be like wiping away a smeary layer of Vaseline from your monitor.

What do I need?

Being an NVIDIA-exclusive technology, you’ll need a compatible NVIDIA graphics card. Specifically, one from their RTX line-up.

Last-generation 20-series or cutting-edge 30-series, as long as it’s RTX, you’re good to go.

DLSS is extremely beneficial for breathing life into older cards. For instance, an RTX 2060 would previously struggle with Red Dead Redemption 2. With the power of DLSS, you can squeeze out additional performance.

We’ve previously covered NVIDIA’s top-of-the-line RTX 3090, if you want to see their Ampere architecture firing on all cylinders.

The future of DLSS

NVIDIA is bringing DLSS to one big-budget release after another. Just last week Doom Eternal, powered by crazily performant id Tech 7 engine, was updated with fully-fledged ray tracing and DLSS support. Rip and tear in glorious pin-point reflections and blazingly-fast frame rates!

Evidently, they’re heavily invested in the future of DLSS. There’s more to come for sure. It’s quickly becoming a must-have feature for gamers. How could you turn down double the performance?

If you’d like to pick up an RTX-enabled graphics card, check out our range, over at Ebuyer: NVIDIA graphics cards

While you at it, check out our overview of the Gigabyte G5, a gaming laptop with on-the-go RTX capabilities.