Since NVIDIA introduced its ray tracing and other AI-enhanced tech with its RTX graphics cards, Blender has been using the tech to enhance 3D rendering and modelling workloads, with NVIDIA OptiX bringing massive improvements to previews in Blender's Cycles Engine. Apparently, DLSS will be the next big NVIDIA technology that Blender will integrate into its Cycles engine to make render previews quicker, more accurate, and less resource-intensive. It effectively uses the same methods as DLSS in gaming applications, reducing the load on the system by rendering a lower resolution version of the scene and then approximating and upscaling the image after the fact. It likely won't have the necessary fidelity to do production-quality renders, but it will almost certainly help preview renders more quickly and with higher precision than the current Eevee and OptiX solutions.

At Siggraph, NVIDIA gave Blender artists and creators hands-on time with a testing build of Blender 5.0 featuring DLSS upscaling and denoising in the viewport, effectively combining the speed and efficiency of Blender's Eevee rendering system with the improved realism and accuracy of the Cycles engine. Blender's upcoming DLSS implementation in Cycles was shown off in comparison clips by Andrew Price on Instagram and Jonathan Lampel on X , and, while it still looks like there is a lot of work to be done, DLSS certainly appears to help generate more realistic render previews much more quickly than Cycles alone. It also doesn't seem to suffer from the same hard limitations on certain materials and transparency effects as Eevee does—although DLSS does still create some artifacts on glass, other transmissive surfaces, and there was some ghosting present, but it is not relying on screen-space techniques to approximate transparency, like Eevee does, so there will conceivably improvements to this ahead of the official Blender 5.0 launch.