DLSS is for anti-aliasing and sharpening, not for denoising. And the technique is different than fixed frame ray tracing denoising because DLSS makes use of multiple frames and motion vectors.
If a neural network can build an idea of what it looks at over a few frames (or one frame ie. YOLO) then use it to improve quality of an image is it not denoising? Hallucinating extra pixels definitely.
Denoising, maybe, I'd say it fits the bill but I'm not a domain expert.
With a static undersampled ray tracing image, the only thing you're doing is hallucinating extra pixels out of nothing but the surrounding pixels that you already have of the same frame.
With DLSS, it's more a matter of creatively combining pixels that actually exist. When you're upscaling two 1080p consecutive images + motion vectors to one 1440p image, the amount of source pixels is higher than the final number of pixels.
That said, with some config file hacking, people have been able to DLSS upscale from 540p to 1080p (with still surprisingly good results). In that case, the amount of source pixels is still lower than the number of destination pixels.
