Nvidia’s DLSS gets a cool new trick, and makes Monster Hunter: World far smoother

Image credit: Nvidia/Capcom (Image credit: Nvidia/Capcom)

If you’ve bought a GeForce RTX graphics card, you’ll doubtless be familiar with the benefits of DLSS – which is arguably more important than ray tracing – and Nvidia has just highlighted the massive boost the tech will give to Monster Hunter: World later this week, with the addition of a fresh option for DLSS in the game, too.

That new option allows the gamer to adjust the level of sharpness which DLSS imparts using a slider under Display settings in Monster Hunter: World. Simply by moving that slider, you can adjust exactly how sharp or soft the image is to your exact tastes.

That’s a pretty nifty additional touch, and apparently much requested from the gaming community. Presumably, we will see this sharpness tweaking functionality come to other games as well, to broaden the appeal of DLSS.

As we’ve seen from the outset with the GeForce RTX cards, DLSS isn’t just about achieving a better image quality in supporting games, but really, it’s more about boosting frame rates and getting smoother gameplay.

Smooth hunting

And in Monster Hunter: World, Nvidia’s own benchmarking shows that at 4K resolution, with maximum graphics details and the high-resolution texture pack installed, gamers can expect increases of anything up to 50%.

In other words, using the RTX 2080 Ti twinned with an Intel Core i9-9900K processor, whereas previously the game ran at 46.7 frames per second (fps), with DLSS enabled, that shoots up to a way smoother 71.6 fps. In fact, that’s a 53% boost.

The RTX 2080 went from 34.7 fps to a speedier 54.9 fps, and it was a similar story for the RTX 2070 which increased from 29.1 fps to 45.7 fps.

And as for the RTX 2060, that rather crawled along at 23.6 fps without DLSS, but with DLSS, it can manage a more playable 37.2 fps (and of course, you can always notch those maxed graphics settings down a little).

DLSS will go live in Monster Hunter: World with a game update in two days’ time, on July 17. To benefit from DLSS, you obviously need to be running a GeForce RTX graphics card (Turing GTX models don’t have this tech, or ray tracing), plus you’ll need Nvidia’s latest Game Ready Driver.

DLSS also requires either 4K resolution or 2,560 x 1,440, with the game being played in full-screen, and you can turn it on under Display settings (the option just above the new sharpness slider).

Also note that you can run the aforementioned high-resolution texture pack (which is a free add-on) if your GPU has at least 8GB of video RAM.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).