DLSS 3 Boosts Diablo IV Low Frame Rate by Nearly 50%

With the Diablo IV Server Slam weekend now open across all platforms (until May 14th at 12 PM Pacific Time), GeForce RTX 40 owners must be curious about the implementation of NVIDIA DLSS 3.

Frame Generation was originally scheduled to be added to Diablo IV at launch, but we learned a few days ago that it would already be available in the Server Slam weekend.

As such, I've tested DLSS 3 with my GeForce RTX 4090 in the city of Kyovashad, the first hub encountered in the game. Diablo IV already runs extremely well, as the previous beta tests had shown, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to couple Frame Generation with DLSS Super Resolution since the frame rate would be far higher than most 4K displays can even handle in terms of refresh rate.

However, NVIDIA and Blizzard Entertainment have implemented DLAA (Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing) into the game. That's great news, as it allows GeForce RTX owners to take advantage of the Tensor Cores to enhance the anti-aliasing and deliver a cleaner image quality whenever the extra performance of DLSS Super Resolution is not needed. While for single player games there is a wrapper called DLSSTweaks that can force DLAA in titles compatible with DLSS but not DLAA, DLSSTweaks shouldn't be used with online games with Diablo IV as it could easily lead to bans caused by anti-cheat software.

As mentioned above, though, DLAA is natively implemented into Diablo IV, and I've tested it paired with DLSS 3.

The average frame rate increased by around 31 FPS, though it was only a 19.5% uplift in percentage, given that the game already runs so fast. The 1% percentile frames per second metrics saw a similar 26.4 FPS (or 21.8%) performance increase.

However, the 0.2% percentile registered a very substantial performance improvement of 45.6 FPS, or 47.4%, when DLSS 3 was enabled. That means the lower frame rate spikes are much higher with Frame Generation, which should bode well for those large-scale world boss fights where many players litter the screen with spellcasting and abilities.

There are reports that DLSS 3 introduces stuttering with the latest AMD Ryzen 7000 Series CPUs, but that already happened with other games and I didn't notice any such issues on my Intel i7 12700K, so it must be an issue with AMD CPUs.

Of course, Diablo IV remains far from one of the games that benefit the most from DLSS 3. That was an easy guess, anyway, since this isn't a CPU-heavy game and those are the types of games where Frame Generation can truly shine.

However, NVIDIA and Blizzard already confirmed that ray tracing will be introduced to the game in a post-launch update. While it is unclear which effects will be ray traced (and indeed, the extent of the visual benefits given the camera view), it's fair to imagine there will be a sizable performance cost. GeForce RTX 40 owners can look forward to absorbing it thanks to DLSS 3.

Diablo IV releases June 6th on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series S|X.

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