Thursday, June 8th 2023
NVIDIA Finds a Clever Way to Boost DLAA Adoption—To Turn it into a DLSS Preset
DLAA, or deep-learning anti-aliasing, is essentially DLSS without the image upscaling. The technology holds the rendering resolution at par with your display's, but uses AI to attempt to add detail to your game, particularly smoothing out edges and other forms in the raster graphics that could require anti-aliasing. The result is image quality that's visibly superior to even native-resolution, and other methods of anti-aliasing, such as TAA and MSAA. Since all this is happening at native resolution, there is zero performance gain, some performance loss, however not one that is comparable to MSAA. It's a wonderful technology, and any game that supports DLSS should naturally expose DLAA in its quality settings to end-users, however this isn't the case. DLAA is seeing sluggish adoption among game developers, and NVIDIA has taken it upon itself to fix this.
NVIDIA is working on updates to DLSS that essentially makes DLAA a quality preset. We know from an article from earlier this week that DLSS performance presets don't just linearly scale render resolution, but affect other algorithm features, such as Reflex. A unique "G" preset was found in an Unreal Engine 5.2 presentation by Epic. It turns out, that this preset is part of the updates NVIDIA is planning for not just DLSS 3, but also DLSS 2, which makes DLAA a quality preset for DLSS. When engaged, it renders the game at 100% display resolution, without upscaling, but applies much of the AI image reconstruction features of DLSS. With this, it is hoped that many more game developers will pick up on DLAA, and integrate it with practically any game that supports DLSS.
Sources:
_emoose_ (Reddit), NVIDIA DLSS 3.1.1.3 Programming Guide
NVIDIA is working on updates to DLSS that essentially makes DLAA a quality preset. We know from an article from earlier this week that DLSS performance presets don't just linearly scale render resolution, but affect other algorithm features, such as Reflex. A unique "G" preset was found in an Unreal Engine 5.2 presentation by Epic. It turns out, that this preset is part of the updates NVIDIA is planning for not just DLSS 3, but also DLSS 2, which makes DLAA a quality preset for DLSS. When engaged, it renders the game at 100% display resolution, without upscaling, but applies much of the AI image reconstruction features of DLSS. With this, it is hoped that many more game developers will pick up on DLAA, and integrate it with practically any game that supports DLSS.
33 Comments on NVIDIA Finds a Clever Way to Boost DLAA Adoption—To Turn it into a DLSS Preset
DLSS is a crutch that hurts image quality more than it helps, IMO. I used DLSS sometimes to get 4K60 running smoothly but in just about every possible scenario I found it better to just lower the graphics settings so that I could run native. Raytracing with DLSS is noisy, shimmery, and has dramatically worse lag on reflections and RT occlusion/shadows. It's bad enough that I notice all the things "wrong" with DLSS far more than I appreciate the higher resolution. YMMV of course, but I can handle slightly lower resolution with ease - sometimes it's as easy as just sitting back a bit further on the sofa. I cannot handle all kinds of smear/lag/shadow-fade-in/wobbly delayed reflections at any viewing distance.
I wonder how many people in the poll are confusing it with DLSS, since in my experience it's better than native 100% of the time. Maybe there's some mild artifacts, but I've never noticed them, and the improvement in anti-aliasing is borderline perfect - looks like a much higher resolution image.
It is a shame to see that so many games which support DLSS don't have a DLAA option currently, hopefully that changes with this and other improvements NVIDIA is making.Try using DLSS with DLDSR, it's basically free performance at no hit to IQ, or better IQ.
Most of the time I rather just have native resolution with a good AA options, or essentially SSAA. If I do need to run DLSS/FSR to get just a few more frames, I might like it better if there was an even higher quality setting that ran at like 1800p or something. I generally rather just have it turned off with some settings tweaked lower. Really only use DLSS/FSR when I have RT enabled.
www.techpowerup.com/review/?category=Game+Testing&manufacturer=&pp=25&order=date
***A few moments later***
DLAA is actually pretty damn decent in some cases. I couldn't see a difference in Cyberpunk. But in a few other games, its actually pretty impressive.
I've been working through the PS5 ports this year - God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Uncharted 4 etc - and they all support DLSS and they're all third-person so whenever you turn the camera (which is just about all the time) you get this horrific shimmering down the trailing edge of the player character front and center of your experience. That would be bad enough but then all three games also suffer from the repeating artifact issue where that trailing edge shimmer is then stamped and repeated into the background. It honestly doesn't matter what the resolution is, I'd rather play at 720p native than 4K with DLSS image issues.
All three of those named games look FANTASTIC with DLSS in static screenshots but the human eye (technically the visual cortex) is incredible at picking out patterns in motion - and not by coincidence either, it's an evolutionary trait in most animals to spot camouflaged prey/predators because those that couldn't starved or were eaten, respectively. The number of games that look really good with DLSS is tiny, and most of those are the highest-profile AAA games where Nvidia has made a special effort to get involved at the developer level (eg, CP2077). Even then, it's taken several iterations to work around the inherent artifacts that come from upscaling so it's still not an absolute win vs native resolution.
So yeah, it can't possibly look worse than native + TAA because that's the starting point for DLAA and no upscaling means no pixel-guesswork artifacts. It's literally all the good bits of DLSS with none of the bad bits.
The AA in DLAA/DLSS is the best TAA derivative in the business, hands down, no question about it imo.
DLAA really shines when you have sub-pixel lines (such as cables in the distance, wire-link fences etc), or very slightly off-angled geometry that's half a degree off the horizontal or vertical pixel grid. If the game doesn't have an art style that trips up TAA then it seems fair to me to call TAA comparable. Not all games need DLAA to pull off near-perfect AA quality.
As good as DLAA is, it's not free; It has one of the highest performance overheads of any AA method outside of the long-obsolete MSAA and in that poll, "better" is subjective - based on the games a person plays, whether they interpret the word "better" considering the performance cost or just looking at image quality alone, and doesn't give you any idea how many of those "no" respondents were on the fence, given that the wording of the question is "always". I can definitely imagine there are games I haven't played where DLAA has little benefit but still adds the performance penalty, even though all the DLAA games I've played look better with DLAA!
In the end, the poll is very vague and leaves lots of room for how you want to interpret the term 'better' and the multiple ways in which that could be true.
discount all video cards by 70% so everyone on the planet gets one???
;)
If you have headroom to spare, you should definitely turn it on.