‘God Of War’ PC devs explain why they put DLSS in the game

Both Matt DeWald of Sony Santa Monica and Steve Tolin of Jetpack Interactive recently talked to Eurogamer. They provided insight into the challenges and decisions of porting the series soft-reboot to PC.

The two developers talk about adding Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) to the game, which renders gameplay at a low resolution, then uses AI upscaling to restore the desired resolution using less GPU power.

“We wanted to address hitting a wide space of machines, so the image scalars basically allow a lot of scalability for the player,” said Tolin of why DLSS was a goal during development. “Once we put in our own temporal image scaler, then it was okay, now, let’s support the DLSS and the AMD scaler, to basically give players the vast variety of options, to be able to tune it to get that experience that they need.

“You may have a 4K monitor, but you may not have a GPU that’s actually going to run at 4K, so we’re giving those options to the players be able to scale the image and the rendering, to get the image that they want,” they added.

DeWald continued: “Let’s be honest, DLSS is an amazing technology, so we definitely wanted to support that. And then when AMD came out with Super Res (FSR), we just decided to get on that as well, on top of our own scaler… [they all] tap into the same underlying system, so they’re fairly straightforward to implement. When you have one of them implemented, you’re getting the other ones cheaper.”

If FSR or DLSS isn’t turned on, the PC port will automatically use temporal anti-aliasing (TAA), which was present in the original version of God Of War.

The game’s original director Cory Barlog has also recently revealed that it was a “collective” of studios that convinced Sony to port more of its games to PC.

In other news, the PC port of God Of War should run day one on the Steam Deck, as the game already runs “out of the box” on Linux, thanks to Proton.