A few months ago at SIGGRAPH was a demo of Blender with NVIDIA Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) integration. The pull request is now open for landing NVIDIA DLSS support into Blender for better quality upscaling/denoising and performance but concerns persist over the licensing due to NVIDIA DLSS binaries.
There is now a pull request from NVIDIA for adding DLSS to Blender’s Cycles with an initial focus on viewport denoising. This Blender viewport denoising is making use of NVIDIA DLSS Ray Reconstruction.
The pull request does note the NVIDIA driver and binary library constraints:
“The integration of DLSS itself is done in a very similar fashion to OptiX: The DLSS SDK is pulled in for the type definitions, the implementation is loaded through the system-level NVIDIA driver. The NVIDIA driver contains the NGX driver component (_nvngx.dll or libnvidia-ngx.so.1), which is loaded dynamically in denoiser_dlss.cpp and queried for all the necessary NGX API entry points. These are then used to query support, initialize and evaluate DLSS. Currently the NGX driver will internally look for a DLSS implementation library (nvngx_dlssd.dll or libnvidia-ngx-dlssd.so.*) in the application path and prefers to load and talk to that to execute the requests coming from the application through the NGX API. This means the API will return DLSS as being unsupported unless a version of that library is installed.
Similar to the OptiX denoiser, the DLSS denoiser option is only shown on systems that have CUDA devices. On those systems that do, but do not support DLSS (e.g. because the DLSS implementation library was not installed by the user, or the driver is too old, or the GPU is not supported), the option is greyed out and denoising is disabled. The minimum required NVIDIA driver is 590+.”
While Blender has the OptiX support for a while and can be easily enabled, there are concerns over the DLSS integration.
At today’s Blender Render & Cycles Meeting the minutes note:
“The results are very impressive. However from the Blender side there are still concerns about the distribution method and licensing, and we do not feel comfortable shipping it with the current mechanism. Ideally this would instead be part of the NVIDIA driver without the need to put dlls next to the Blender executable. We may consider merging the Blender side implementation already but not shipping it, that’s to be discussed still.”
There is also hope that Intel’s Open Image Denoise 3 that is expected to ship later in 2026 may be a competitive option while being open-source while likely working fine cross-vendor too:
“OpenImageDenoise 3 is expected to have an improved high performance denoiser, which should work across GPU vendors. However a release may be 6 months or more away from now, and it’s unknown if it will have comparable performance and quality. An open source and cross vendor solution like this is preferable for Blender however.”
We’ll see what ends up shipping out of this NVIDIA DLSS pull request for Blender.
