Ever since NVIDIA introduced ray tracing and other AI-enhanced technologies with its RTX graphics cards, Blender has been utilizing these advancements to enhance 3D rendering and modeling tasks. NVIDIA OptiX has brought significant improvements to previews in Blender's Cycles Engine. The next major NVIDIA technology that Blender plans to integrate into its Cycles engine is DLSS, which aims to make render previews faster, more precise, and less resource-intensive. This technology works similarly to DLSS in gaming applications by rendering a lower resolution version of the scene and then approximating and upscaling the image afterwards. While it may not achieve the same level of detail as production-quality renders, it is expected to significantly improve the speed and accuracy of preview renders compared to the current Eevee and OptiX solutions.
At Siggraph, NVIDIA provided Blender artists and creators with hands-on experience using a testing build of Blender 5.0 featuring DLSS upscaling and denoising in the viewport. This integration combines the speed and efficiency of Blender's Eevee rendering system with the enhanced realism and accuracy of the Cycles engine. Comparison clips by Andrew Price on Instagram and Jonathan Lampel showcased Blender's upcoming DLSS implementation in Cycles, indicating that while there is still work to be done, DLSS appears to help generate more realistic render previews much faster than Cycles alone. Additionally, DLSS does not seem to face the same limitations on certain materials and transparency effects as Eevee, although it may still produce artifacts on glass and other transmissive surfaces. However, since DLSS does not rely on screen-space techniques to approximate transparency like Eevee does, improvements are expected before the official launch of Blender 5.0.
