We had a quick chat with Frontier’s Director of Technology Matt Simper to find out his thoughts and views on the implementation of DLSS 3 into the construction and management game. Just like Fatshark in our previous Darktide interview, he mainly praised the technique’s ability to circumvent the frame-boosting limitations of DLSS 2 with CPU-bound games.
What was your first impression of DLSS 3 as a developer? Do you feel that AI-based Frame Generation is the future of rendering to keep up with advanced ray tracing effects? DLSS 3 seems like a great evolution of the DLSS technology. When they gave us more details about how it worked, increased latency was an area we wondered about, however rendering is an ever-evolving field and many techniques exist to compensate for the drawbacks and performance concerns with other techniques. Frame generation is certainly a key technique when it comes to providing a seamless experience for players. How much of an improvement does DLSS 3 introduce in your game compared to DLSS 2 (Super Resolution)? While we’ve only relatively recently got our hands on a 4000 series card, we’re seeing a significant framerate boost (in the order of 50% - 100%), and it looks really impressive in motion. DLSS 3 is a great fit for Frontier’s simulation-based games (since the genre is often CPU workload heavy) so being able to get an even smoother framerate with the click of a button is great for players. One of the potential drawbacks of DLSS 3 is the additional latency. Does Frame Generation add significant latency in your implementation, or is Reflex able to cover that? Our games generally aren’t particularly sensitive to latency, which is another reason why DLSS 3 is a good fit for us. Even so, Reflex is doing a really good job at clawing back a lot of the additional latency it adds, so we have no concerns with this trade-off and are confident that players will see the benefits of this technology. Do you have an ETA on when DLSS 3 will be added to your game? Jurassic World Evolution: Dominion Malta Expansion will be arriving on December 8th, and we’re pleased to say that the free base-game update arriving alongside this will provide PC players with DLSS 3 support. This means even greater performance and more responsive gameplay through NVIDIA Reflex for those playing on NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPUs. The new GeForce RTX 4000 Series also introduced Shader Execution Reordering (SER), Opacity Micro-Maps (OMM) and Displaced Micro-Mesh (DMM) to help with ray tracing optimization. All of these have to be explicitly enabled and set up by game developers. Are you planning to take advantage of any of them? These are all really interesting technologies that we are certainly taking a close look at. However, we don’t have anything further to share regarding their inclusion. Lastly, what do you think of RTX Remix as a developer? We’re always interested in the latest developments, however RTX Remix isn’t something we’ve looked at closely. Thank you for your time.
