Blender's Nvidia DLSS upscaling looks like a game changer for 3D animation and game art

SIGGRAPH 2025 has passed by in Vancouver in a blur of groundbreaking advances in AI and robotics (and a tribute to 30 years of Toy Story). But highlights for many 3D artists were a couple of demos of new features coming to Blender, a free and open-source program that's become on the of the best 3D modelling software options.

Blender teased the introduction of Nvidia-powered real-time path tracing via its DLSS upscaling tech, and users are excited about how much less frustrating that could make previewing work in the viewport on Cycles.

DLSS stands for Deep Learning Super Sampling. It's a tech developed by the GPU giant Nvidia that uses AI to upscale lower-resolution images, allowing for higher resolutions and better visual fidelity without the hit on performance.

The addition of DLSS denoising as an option in the Cycles render engine in Blender takes a much lower resolution viewport and upscales it with AI to look like the normal image using less computing power than usual methods. It's also optimised to handle low ray counts in video games.

As demonstrated in the video above shared by Andrew Price, AKA Blender Guru, the result is that previews in the viewport are much smoother to interact in. Although the tool results in ghosting, this is a lot easier to live with than the frustration that comes from a slow viewport, making pre-vis more viable or less powerful computers (although you'll still need a Nvidia RTX graphics card).

"It made moving around the viewport feel as smooth as EEVEE!" one SIGGRAPH attendee enthused on X after viewing the demo. "It did have ghosting during animation and glass objects were flickery, just like DLSS in games, but for previewing scenes it is incredible. Night and day difference in interactivity in the viewport."

There was no clarification of when the DLSS denoiser will be coming to Blende, but some people are already wondering if we'll see more animated movies opting being made using blender due to the pre-vis being better (see our guide to the best animation software for the alternatives).

The latest stable release is Blender 4.5 LTS, which was released on 15 July. Blender 5.0 is currently in Alpha testing until 1 October, 2025.