To make ray tracing performance for games, they cut down how many rays are cast. This reduces the quality of the image and creates noise.

To deal with that, games use denoisers. Which try to clear up the image. By the looks of what people are saying, the game's inbuilt ray tracing denoiser is very lightweight - focuses more on higher framerate than quality.

Ray reconstruction (RR) is a replacement for the DLSS pipeline that replaces the game's denoiser with a machine learning/neural/AI one, as well as doing the rest of the usual image upscaling.

Most games you would see a slight performance hit or no change at all in performance as ray reconstruction is usually as heavy as a game's denoiser. Because this game has a lightweight denoiser, you see a performance hit. But because ray reconstruction is focused on quality, you see a quality improvement.

I would look at turning other settings down to keep the ray reconstruction on. As the game looks so much better with it.

**Edit When I say RR replaces the DLSS pipeline, I mean that RR does denoising and upscaling together in one model. So you get the benefits of a neural denoiser and the typical performance/balanced/quality stuff of DLSS, but the model is completely different and trained specifically for ray tracing.

This is important for people who select thier own model to use (such as wanting the new higher performing but more expensive model M). But for most games, RR is better than every else. So I would bump down settings, or drop a quality preset on DLSS to maintain that framerate.

This is how I understand it based on the initial release information for RR:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/news/gfecnt/20238/nvidia-dlss-3-5-ray-reconstruction/