AMD Doesn't Believe in NVIDIA's DLSS, Stands for Open SMAA and TAA Solutions

[Raevenlord]

A report via PCGamesN places AMD's stance on NVIDIA's DLSS as a rather decided one: the company stands for further development of SMAA (Enhanced Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing) and TAA (Temporal Antialising) solutions on current, open frameworks, which, according to AMD's director of marketing, Sasa Marinkovic, "(...) are going to be widely implemented in today's games, and that run exceptionally well on Radeon VII", instead of investing in yet another proprietary solution. While AMD pointed out that DLSS' market penetration was a low one, that's not the main issue of contention. In fact, AMD decides to go head-on against NVIDIA's own technical presentations, comparing DLSS' image quality and performance benefits against a native-resolution, TAA-enhanced image - they say that SMAA and TAA can work equally as well without "the image artefacts caused by the upscaling and harsh sharpening of DLSS."

Of course, AMD may only be speaking from the point of view of a competitor that has no competing solution. However, company representatives said that they could, in theory, develop something along the lines of DLSS via a GPGPU framework - a task for which AMD's architectures are usually extremely well-suited. But AMD seems to take the eyes of its DLSS-defusing moves, however, as AMD's Nish Neelalojanan, a Gaming division exec, talks about potential DLSS-like implementations across "Some of the other broader available frameworks, like WindowsML and DirectML", and that these are "something we [AMD] are actively looking at optimizing… At some of the previous shows we've shown some of the upscaling, some of the filters available with WindowsML, running really well with some of our Radeon cards." So whether it's an actual image-quality philosophy, or just a competing technology's TTM (time to market) one, only AMD knows.



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[MrAMD]

DLSS actually looks sharper to me vs TAA on 4K. Although I would rather have no AA at all for 4K..

 

[hutt132]

I think you have the labeling wrong on the comparison screenshots.

 

[Ferrum Master]

I think you have the labeling wrong on the comparison screenshots.

IMHO yes... they are vice versa.

 

[c2DDragon]

Who took those screenshots ?
No way TAA does FXAA-like effects...I can't believe this.

 

[Fouquin]

Of course, MAD may only be speaking from the point of view of a competitor that has no competing solution.

I dunno, I don't think they're very mad about it.

 

[neatfeatguy]

I think you have the labeling wrong on the comparison screenshots.

Nah. Those are the screen shots of the set benchmark/program that Nvidia could make look really good with DLSS. Actual performance seen from BFV and the new Metro game, plus FFXV prove that (as you said the images are labeled wrong) DLSS looks more like the TAA and the TAA looks more like the DLSS in the provided screen shots.

 

[SystemMechanic]

I still dont understand How TAA in Port royal is basically BFV's DLSS ?!? For people who cant see, Left images are TAA (Blurry and jagged edges, details lost in some places, like the white arc) and DLSS is on the right, much cleaner, details preserved and no Blur. Its almost as if Nvidia faked these...

IMHO yes... they are vice versa.

They arent lol. That's what confuses me as to by BFV's DLSS looks like the TAA in these screenshots..

Run the benchmark yourself, DLSS is a lot better in Port royal than its TAA counterpart.

 

[rtwjunkie]

Run the benchmark yourself, DLSS is a lot better in Port royal than its TAA counterpart.

Because every frame of a benchmark can be optimized for. Out in the wild, you are more likely to see those pictures actually reversed as far as image quality, based on what I have read so far.

 

[Prince Valiant]

I don't think AMD needs a competitor to DLSS if DLSS can't be drastically improved for games.

"exceptionally well on Radeon VI"
You mean Radeon VII, right?

 

[Deleted member 158293]

If AMD just had PCs to consider they would probably have a very different outlook on their market, but AMD also has the entire gaming ecosystem including consoles, multi-platform game engines and studios to consider, not just PC versions.
The gaming heavyweights Sony & Microsoft would probably not look kindly on AMD creating proprietary solutions (like their PC competitor) which could potentially cause them issues later on. Creating open source multi-partner solutions makes more sense in their case, albeit probably with longer development times.

 

[spectatorx]

DLSS is not an aa method, how could it be anyway as it is just upscaling method?

 

[mandelore]

DLSS is to be blunt, garbage.

Look at the Metro Exodus and Battlefield V screenshots recently posted on Techpowerup.

Id take no AA over DLSS and just cant comprehend how anyone would be ok with blurry graphics, completely defeats the point of using a high resolution gaming screen if you're just going to upsample from a lower resolution and live with blur.

 

[megamanxtreme]

Where are the SMAA options? Multisampling? If not, then it is M.L.A.A.? Sub-pixel Morphological Anti-aliasing.

Id take no AA over DLSS and just cant comprehend how anyone would be ok with blurry graphics, completely defets the point of using a high resolution gaming screen if you're just going to upsample from a lower resolution and live with blur.

They could just enable them for older games to make them look less bad in higher resolutions, but I'll stick with higher resolutions without AA in modern games.

 

[jabbadap]

DLSS is not an aa method, how could it be anyway as it is just upscaling method?

It is AA method by definition. And no it's not just upscaling, you would not need tensor cores to do just that.

 

[Fluffmeister]

It would just be nice if AMD could conclusively beat a 2 year old EOL card with 7nm tech, but the spin from their director of marketing is.... expected.

 

[kastriot]

Well when one day we will have <100 micron pixel even on 32 inch monitors which is btw 8K rez then AA, DLSS and all other aliasing tech will be obsolete, but until then we are stuck with blurriness.

 

[the54thvoid]

Well when one day we will have <100 micron pixel even on 32 inch monitors which is btw 8K rez then AA, DLSS and all other aliasing tech will be obsolete, but until then we are stuck with blurriness.

Yeah, how long before we get gfx cards that can run 8k at 60+FPS?

 

[efikkan]

All kinds of post-processing AA is ultimately flawed, no matter what new gimmick they attach to it. You can't generate information that doesn't exist.

Because every frame of a benchmark can be optimized for. Out in the wild, you are more likely to see those pictures actually reversed as far as image quality, based on what I have read so far.

You mean in the driver? No that's not possible at all.

When Nvidia and AMD "optimizes" a game or benchmark they have a limited set of tools to work with. The most basic one is general rendering options, things like texture filtering, mipmap thresholds etc., the type options you see in the driver control panel, plus a few extra that are available through their native API. The second type of "optimizations" are tweaked shaders, but by optimized in this case it's generally not a feature complete optimization, but rather simplifying it without too obvious degradations in image quality. AAA titles and popular benchmarks are "victims" of this, and both vendors have been caught causing serious artifacts in 3DMark in the past. 3DMark is basically "broken" as a real benchmark at this point.

Then finally there are workarounds in the driver core per application. This is theoretically possible, but exceedingly rare (except for in that mess called Mesa). This is usually used to work around serious problems (bugs or bottlenecks) rather than actual optimizations, since any such workaround adds bloat to the driver.

 

[Vya Domus]

It is AA method by definition.

No it isn't, actually. Aliasing happens when you sample different signals in such a way that they appear identical once put back together, that is the textbook definition. Here the signals represent graphical elements before they are rasterized (sampled) not the whole image as Nvidia would like to imply. The way you avoid aliasing is to apply a filter to those particular elements before they are sampled , or in this case before the image is rendered, MSAA for example works like that (well, not exactly, but the point is that this is done on a per component basis). That is also the textbook definition of how you would go about using an anti-aliasing method.

Whatever DLSS does is applied to the whole mage after it is rendered, it is an upscaling solution nothing more. That's the equivalent of interpolating a signal, not filtering it. Post process AA like FXAA isn't a true method of AA either by definition, because there you try and alter the signal after it was sampled as well not while it is constructed.

you would not need tensor cores to do just that.

You don't, you use those cores only to make it faster.

 

[M2B]

The entire money and time (even if it isn't much) that nvidia is spending on DLSS is a waste.
They should entirely focus on the Ray-Tracing implementation instead, Metro is a nice showcase for them, after I saw the Ray Traced global illumination in metro exodus it really made me think that Ray Tracing has the potential to improve things in games, Cyberpunk 2077 is a good opportunity for nvidia, a game that most enthusiast PC gamers actually care about, they have a lot of time left to properly implement Ray Tracing in it and maybe make the game a true showcase for their next Gen GPUs.

 

[Aquinus]

artefacts

Typo?

Isn't the purpose of DLSS to use all of that extra crap nVidia added to the RTX series cards? It's more of a "Hey look, all that extra stuff you got actually isn't a waste!" This is like AMD saying, "Actually, it was. We already have open solutions that are perfectly adequate and widely used."

 

[Basard]

The entire money and time (even if it isn't much) that nvidia is spending on DLSS is a waste.
They should entirely focus on the Ray-Tracing implementation instead, Metro is a nice showcase for them, after I saw the Ray Traced global illumination in metro exodus it really made me think that Ray Tracing has the potential to improve things in games, Cyberpunk 2077 is a good opportunity for nvidia, a game that most enthusiast PC gamers actually care about, they have a lot of time left to properly implement Ray Tracing in it and maybe make the game a true showcase for their next Gen GPUs.

Yeah.... they shoulda ditched tensor cores and just focused on more RTX cores or something.

 

[moproblems99]

Cyberpunk 2077 is a good opportunity for nvidia

Please don't encourage them.

 

[Metroid]

taa is very blurred, i do prefer dlss on those images above, night and day compared. What the hell amd is smoking saying taa is better than dlss.