The Ascent has some confusing issues with DLSS on Game Pass

The Ascent launched this week, offering players another cyberpunk-themed adventure to get lost in. We reviewed it and found the game to be a blast, though it did have a few small technical issues, or so we thought. It appears that the Game Pass Microsoft Store version of The Ascent does not have DLSS, whereas those who own the game on Steam get access to the framerate-boosting feature.

This issue become apparent when our EIC Cam decided to check the game out after my insistence that everyone with Game Pass give it a go. While the Steam review version ran alright on the RTX 3060 in 4K, the framerates were significantly more consistent with DLSS enabled. Those with graphics cards that support the feature more than likely use it whenever it’s available in a game. As such, Cam discovered in very little time that the Game Pass version of The Ascent had DLSS entirely greyed out for some reason.

To make matters even stranger, the Steam version has an option for DLSS Ultra Quality, which has yet to even be officially announced by Nvidia.

DLSS SNAFU

Seeing as The Ascent features RTX ray tracing, DLSS is pretty much a necessary feature for those that want to use those features. Ray tracing causes a massive performance hit, no matter the game. Unless you have a beastly graphics card or don’t mind playing at lower resolutions, ray tracing in the Game Pass version of The Ascent is pretty much out of the question.

The latest update for the Game Pass version of The Ascent has even removed DLSS completely from the game. This is obviously to avoid confusion, though anyone that heard about the initial DLSS announcement or read the initial reviews and saw mention of it is sure to be confused by now. Unfortunately, the developers have still not commented on the situation . We’ll update this article if anything changes, but the Steam version of the game is fine at the very least.

The settings menu of The Ascent as it appears on the Game Pass version.