Nvidia CEO Invented and Announced DLSS Technology in Just Two Weeks

A new book about the history of Nvidia reveals surprising details about the creation of DLSS. It turns out that this industry-leading feature was invented in just two weeks, and the idea came from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang himself.

As the book's author, Tae Kim, writes, before SIGGRAPH 2018, Huang asked his engineers to come up with ideas for a spectacular announcement. Among the proposals was an option using deep learning to improve anti-aliasing (DLAA), but it seemed to him not significant enough:

“What if we make entry-level graphics cards work at the level of flagships, using artificial intelligence to increase resolution?”.

Thus the concept of DLSS was born: rendering in 1440p with subsequent upscaling to 4K while maintaining high performance.

A week later, Nvidia researcher Aaron Lefon reported that the first results were promising. Huang immediately ordered them to be included in the presentation, and DLSS was first heard on a public stage.

The book claims that Nvidia immediately saw the commercial potential of the technology. If DLSS works, the entire line of graphics cards will receive a significant performance boost, allowing the company to raise the price tag. And so it happened: today DLSS is one of the main advantages of GeForce RTX graphics cards, and competitors like AMD and Intel are still catching up with Nvidia in the field of AI upscaling.