Blizzard and Vicarious Visions did a pretty good job with Diablo 2: Resurrected, giving the aged ARPG a gorgeous graphical makeover while not interfering with the core experience that first hooked so many of us into its grimdark world of endless grind. In the spirit of making this nostalgia trip even smoother, the game has added support for Nvidia DLSS.
And while that's great, not every player is happy.
DLSS means an Nvidia GPU (20xx or later) can expect significant framerate increases when they switch the feature on in a game's graphics options. It uses AI learning to create high-resolution images while not requiring your GPU to render all those pixels that higher resolution would normally require.
It's basically free frames, though be warned that if you opt for the 'Performance' DLSS option, then it's not uncommon to notice blurring and a kind of compressed video effect.
Players have already started toying with the new DLSS feature in Diablo 2: Resurrected, but some are reporting that even on the 'Quality' setting, DLSS makes the image too blurry. Redditor kitek867 let us use the above image showing the difference between DLSS being off and DLSS set to 'Quality.' They added that "increasing sharpening fixed the blurriness a little, but it still looks terrible."
Another redditor, proff13, pointed out that the game uses an old version of the DLSS DLL (2.2.11), and said that it runs better on 2.3.4. It's relatively simple to swap out a game's DLSS DLL to a more recent version, and you can grab the latest ones here. You can even use a dedicated DLSS Swapper for the job.
DLSS or not, Diablo 2: Resurrected is the right kind of remaster, with Luke Winkie pointing out in his review that it's refreshing to play a game like this "with no monetary retrofitting around the edges to bring it further into the 21st century." It's an innocent old-school RPG, which is frankly surprisingly coming from master monetisers Activision-Blizzard.
