When Nvidia's DLSS tech first started to become available, it looked a little bit like a revolution in the sorts of results you could expect from a gaming laptop - your hardware almost felt like it was upgraded without you doing anything.

DLSS stands for Deep Learning Super Sampling, and it increases framerate while generating beautiful game images. DLSS promises to increase performance and efficiency while providing superior image quality. How do they do it? We've got all the details, right here.

Tensor Cores, AI, Performance Increases

Nvidia Tensor Cores are pieces of hardware built into its GPUs that specialise in running Artificial Intelligence calculations. With DLSS, the NVIDIA GPU partially renders an image and then uses its Tensor Cores and AI algorithms to fill in missing information. It’s a clever optimisation that enables the GPU to render more frames while DLSS fills in the rest. 

By enabling DLSS, your GPU is unleashed; it’s able to deliver more frames per second to your display since AI is helping to generate the image.

How does DLSS help with a laptop's power efficiency?

The portability of a laptop comes with power, heat, and noise constraints. All of the components inside the laptop must share power and thermal solutions while trying to keep noise and temperatures in check.

How well does your laptop hardware perform given the constraints? That’s a question of efficiency, and that’s another way to think about laptop hardware.

Every laptop GPU must function within a power limit, and DLSS is unique for laptops because it increases game performance while maintaining the GPU at the same power. 

More performance, same power. That’s how DLSS gets you more out of the hardware already in your laptop, that’s how DLSS increases efficiency.

Image quality

AI has come a long way in the last few years, and DLSS is no exception. With DLSS, users can expect similar or even better image quality than natively rendered images without the aid of AI. In some cases, DLSS produces significantly better images since the AI algorithm uses temporal feedback techniques for sharper image details and improved stability from frame to frame.

 DLSS offers users four image quality modes: Quality, Balanced, Performance, and Ultra Performance. These control the game’s internal rendering resolution, with Performance mode enabling up to a 4x resolution modifier (1080p → 4K). The user gets more options and can change the DLSS mode for even bigger performance increases.

When you put together the performance, efficiency, and image quality upsides, DLSS really does start to feel fairly miraculous. Find out even more about it from Nvidia here, and be sure to activate it if you have compatible hardware - you might never look back!