NVIDIA has been bringing ray tracing and other Artificial Intelligence-enhanced technologies from its RTX graphics platform into Blender, and the company is now testing DLSS integration for Blender´s Cycles engine. DLSS uses the same approach it does in gaming: render a lower resolution version of the scene and approximate and upscale the image afterward to reduce system load. Blender previously gained significant preview performance from NVIDIA OptiX, and DLSS is presented as the next step to make viewport previews quicker, more accurate, and less resource-intensive.
At Siggraph, NVIDIA allowed Blender artists to test a build of Blender 5.0 with DLSS upscaling and denoising active in the viewport. The implementation aims to combine the speed and efficiency typical of Blender´s Eevee renderer with the improved realism and accuracy of the Cycles engine. Comparison clips shared by Andrew Price on Instagram and Jonathan Lampel on X showed DLSS generating more realistic render previews considerably faster than Cycles alone, indicating tangible viewport gains even in an early testing state.
The preview implementation is not presented as a replacement for production-quality renders. It likely will not deliver the fidelity required for final output, but it should help artists iterate faster and evaluate materials and lighting with higher precision than current Eevee and OptiX previews. Early tests suggest DLSS avoids some of Eevee´s hard limitations on certain materials and transparency, since it does not rely on screen-space approximations for transparency. That said, testers observed artifacts on glass and other transmissive surfaces and some ghosting, so additional work is expected before the official Blender 5.0 release. Overall, DLSS in Cycles appears poised to speed up preview workflows while improving preview realism ahead of the formal launch.
