500 games and apps now have Nvidia DLSS, ray tracing, or both

By Nvidia’s count, there are now 500 games and applications that employ DLSS upscaling and ray tracing visual effects – or "RTX technologies," in GPU superpower speak. While there’s arguably some cheekiness behind that count, as ray tracing in particular is not an RTX-exclusive feature, it is nonetheless quite the feat for a set of tools that launched in subjectively auspicious circumstances back in 2018.

These days, the performance and visual benefits of DLSS are much more compelling, and even ray tracing has become relatively attainable through capable mid-range GPUs like the RTX 3060 Ti. And if demand is going up, clearly supply is too. In 2021, three years after launch, DLSS claimed its 100th supporting game, meaning that several hundred more have signed up in just the two years since. That’s a lot of upscaled pixels, and the tech itself is only becoming more sophisticated, as DLSS 3 and DLSS 3.5 attest.

I still worry that some developers look at DLSS, get framerate counters in their eyes, and simply rely on it as a magic go-faster button instead of making sure their games run well at native resolution (or, indeed, on older GPUs that lack support for it). Remnant II remains the most egregious example, but both Starfield and Alan Wake 2 make upscaling seem a little like too much of a must-have. Hopefully the next 500 games will maintain their discipline, especially as DLSS 3’s frame generation needs a solid foundation on which to build its AI frames.

Either way, it feels unlikely that DLSS and ray tracing will take another five years to reach that 1K tally. They’ve become true PC gaming mainstays, as likely to show up in esoteric indies as they are the latest omni-marketed blockbusters – plus the occasional Half-Life 2 mod, obviously.