DLSS Won’t Be Available in EA’s Anthem at Launch – Ray Tracing “Could be Added Later”

In Nvidia’s CES 2019 keynote, the company proudly announced that DLSS support would be coming to Anthem, Bioware’s upcoming open-world action game.  

DLSS, Deep Learning Super Sampling, is a technology which is designed to run on Nvidia’s AI-optimised Turing cores, using a Deep Learning algorithm to upscale lower resolution images higher resolution outputs. This not only allows DLSS to offer higher performance levels than native resolution rendering, but it also provides several improvements over TAA, Temporal Anti Aliasing, which is known to have a blurring effect on rendered images. DLSS should allow rendered images to be sharper than a native image with TAA and eliminate temporal artefacts, making DLSS an incredibly appealing technology for PC gamers.      

In a recent interview with Wccftech, Scylla Costa, one of Anthem’s producers, stated that DLSS support would be coming to Anthem “shortly after launch”, which means that Nvidia RTX 20 series GPU owners will need to wait a little longer before they get to use Turing’s AI prowess to boost Anthem’s performance. 

In the same interview, Costa also stated that “ray tracing could be added (to Anthem) later”, stating that Bioware “don’t currently have anything to announce in this space”. Anthem’s PC system requirements list the game as a DirectX 11 only title, making the game incompatible with Microsoft’s DXR ray tracing API at the time of writing. The game’s Frostbite engine is capable of running under DirectX 12, but enabling DXR raytracing support will require a solid implementation of DirectX 12 to build upon, something which could take a lot of development effort to achieve.