What DLSS/FSR Upscaling Mode do you use?

[wolf]

A native rendered image is always the the highest quality one can achieve. This is not subjective

It's really not the highest quality you can display on any given panel. That's not subjective either.

Like AusWolf though perhaps we need to agree to disagree in the interest not not having the thread turn to crap.

 

[iameatingjam]

It depends - usually balanced.

But I'm also using dldsr (at 4k) so if we are comparing to monitor output resolution (1440p), its close to native.

However, there are exceptions like when I was playing dragon age veilguard I was noticing some artifacts from dlss even after increasing to quality ( which is higher than native!), mostly where two sharply contrasting colours met. So I ran that one with TAA and rendered at straight 4k, quite a workout for the gpu. Turned down some less important settings ( like special effects) but kept the important ones on max and I thought that worked well.

Weird that, DLSS has always worked well for me, dunno why this one is an outlier.

A native rendered image is always the the highest quality one can achieve. This is not subjective.

What really? Or do you mean just in regards to dlss and upscaling?

My issue is native vs downsampling.... Do you believe the same there? Downsampling (through dldsr) improves my image quality so much that I went from using it only when AA was missing or insufficient to using it at all times. Now its almost hard to look at native images in games unless there's very good AA and still I prefer using that good AA + dldsr for even better picture quality. Used to be very satisfied with native 1440p. Now its almost got a blurry-pixelated look vs rendered at 4k internally and downsampled.

I do mix with dlss sometimes but I suppose I shouldn't overcomplicate the discussion. Out of the games I play, more don't have dlss than do, anyway.

 

[lexluthermiester]

What really? Or do you mean just in regards to dlss and upscaling?

I mean before any "filtering" is applied. Scaling, AA and image altering effects often detract or degrade the image being displayed. What I mean by "native" is the image rendered by the game before any processing is applied.

 

[iameatingjam]

I mean before any "filtering" is applied. Scaling, AA and image altering effects often detract or degrade the image being displayed. What I mean by "native" is the image rendered by the game before any processing is applied.

I see. It must be subjective then because I have always hated aliasing more than any other visual bother in games and often take up to 5 different approaches at the same time to eliminate it, thats how much I can't stand it.

 

[lexluthermiester]

I have always hated aliasing more than any other visual bother

Same here. I never enable it.

 

[JustBenching]

It's really not the highest quality you can display on any given panel. That's not subjective either.

Like AusWolf though perhaps we need to agree to disagree in the interest not not having the thread turn to crap.

Do we really need to agree to disagree though? May not have a 20/20 vision on both eyes, but man does native seem to have some major issues that dlss fixes

 

[AVATARAT]

Do we really need to agree to disagree though? May not have a 20/20 vision on both eyes, but man does native seem to have some major issues that dlss fixes

I'm downloading it in 4k video and can't see what you mean. Can you explain it? And I hope you didn't watch it via youtube where the compression corrupts the picture.

 

[BSim500]

Do we really need to agree to disagree though? May not have a 20/20 vision on both eyes, but man does native seem to have some major issues that dlss fixes

Not surprising given the first 5 seconds of the video, the settings show 1440p @ 67% render resolution is being passed off as "1440p native"...

 

[JustBenching]

I'm downloading it in 4k video and can't see what you mean. Can you explain it? And I hope you didn't watch it via youtube where the compression corrupts the picture.

TAA image instability. So you get worse performance and worse image quality by playing native. Worse of both worlds basically.

Not surprising given the first 5 seconds of the video, the settings show 1440p @ 67% render resolution is being passed off as "1440p native"...

They are all at 67% render resolution, why is native the worst?

 

[BSim500]

They are all at 67% render resolution, why is native the worst?

None of the "1440p native" captions match what he's actually doing - rendering the game 2096x1180 (barely more than 1080p) then stamping a 1440p HUD / UI over the top, then falsely adding a "1440p native TAA" caption (when it's nothing of the kind) then declaring upscaled versions look better. When doing visual comparisons, the only sane / honest way of actually judging what native resolution looks like is to render with 100% render scale + disable "Dynamic Resolution" (where the game can decide to randomly lower the render resolution at any time) so that native 1440p is... actually native 1440p its advertised to be...

 

[JustBenching]

None of the "1440p native" captions match what he's actually doing - rendering the game 2096x1180 (barely more than 1080p) then stamping a 1440p HUD / UI over the top, then falsely adding a "1440p native TAA" caption (when it's nothing of the kind) then declaring upscaled versions look better. When doing visual comparisons, the only sane / honest way of actually judging what native resolution looks like is to render with 100% render scale + disable "Dynamic Resolution" (where the game can decide to randomly lower the render resolution at any time) so that native 1440p is... actually native 1440p its advertised to be...

I can post you a video when I'm back home, 4k and 100% render scale, the image instability is still there. It's same with tlou that I have already posted a few pages ago. Happens in CP2077 as well.

 

[BSim500]

I can post you a video when I'm back home, 4k and 100% render scale, the image instability is still there. It's same with tlou that I have already posted a few pages ago. Happens in CP2077 as well.

I don't doubt there are games that benefit. There are also others for which DLSS adds image instability.

 

[wolf]

Do we really need to agree to disagree though?

I can agree to disagree on what people prefer to look at, but not that native is the best quality.

Native is good, great even, a 1:1 render to match your display output. The best however it is not, there's a word for what it is, and that's simply, native.

My point here is that you can absolutely, and consistently exceed native image quality by rendering in excess of 1:1, like for example 4:1. 2160p render, colour value average calculated of 4 pixels and 1 is displayed as 1080p which consistently proves to have higher image quality than native 1080p as it can leverage sub pixel detail from a native render, and of course appears antialiased in the most natural way. Broadly this is supersampling and downsampling.

People are free to not "like" what supersampling looks like, but there's no world where I agree native is the best image quality when supersampling exists. I will die on this hill.

 

[JustBenching]

I don't doubt there are games that benefit. There are also others for which DLSS adds image instability.

Sure, the problem is the video you used as evidenced declares that dlss looks better than native in the majority of games. While also being faster. Your evidence kinda proves my point

 

[BSim500]

Sure, the problem is the video you used as evidenced declares that dlss looks better than native in the majority of games. While also being faster. Your evidence kinda proves my point

When people say "Ooh, native looks so ugly because of the blurring" what they really mean is "This game forces TAA on and it''s that looks ugly but I'll blame native instead". Native then gets an unfair reputation from people conflating two different things. But that never was necessary, and there are games that run natively without TAA that look great. If you used DLSS then forced TAA on top of that anyway, that would look a blurry mess too. Half these comparisons aren't just testing upscaling / super-sampling, they're inadvertently testing other unrelated engine quirks that gets enabled / disabled on whim on top of that, kinda reminiscent of how HDR was advertised a few years back where on top of the HDR-ness, they reduced the colour saturation on the SDR versions in side-by-side shots, to make them look artificially worse...

It would certainly be nice if we did have "actual like for comparisons" (native without TAA vs DLSS without TAA) as a frame of reference of the effect of just upscaling, but let's be polite and say "they are quite hard to find"...

 

[JustBenching]

When people say "Ooh, native looks so ugly because of the blurring" what they really mean is "This game forces TAA on and it''s that looks ugly but I'll blame native instead". Native then gets an unfair reputation from people conflating two different things. But that never was necessary, and there are games that run natively without TAA that look great. If you used DLSS then forced TAA on top of that anyway, that would look a blurry mess too. Half these comparisons aren't just testing upscaling, they're inadvertently testing other unrelated engine quirks that gets enabled / disabled on whim on top of that, kinda reminiscent of how HDR was advertised a few years back where on top of the HDR-ness, they reduced the colour saturation on the SDR versions in side-by-side shots, to make them look artificially worse...

It would certainly be nice if we did have "actual like for comparisons" (native without TAA vs DLSS without TAA) as a frame of reference of the effect of just upscaling, but let's be polite and say "they are quite hard to find"...

Sure but the majority of games are actually forcing TAA as far as I know. Can't even turn it off. Native without TAA would still look worse than dlss for different reasons, jaggies. You still need AA on native even at 4k, and good AA is insanely expensive computationaly.

Of course there are way to get better image quality than dlss, but there isn't a way to get better image quality at the same performance as dlss, which imo is really the only thing that matters.

 

[AVATARAT]

Of course there are way to get better image quality than dlss, but there isn't a way to get better image quality at the same performance as dlss, which imo is really the only thing that matters.

You are trying to defend something wrong/different, yes we all know DLSS can fix some visual errors and add another one because it is an upscaler and needs to fill in the missing information in the picture. Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes it doesn't, the main goal of the upscaler is to get as close as possible to the original image (native) because by default it should be of the best quality.
It can't do better than 100%, if we say it's better then it's different from what the developer set, at which point we go in a different direction of discussion.

 

[JustBenching]

You are trying to defend something wrong/different, yes we all know DLSS can fix some visual errors and add another one because it is an upscaler and needs to fill in the missing information in the picture. Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes it doesn't, the main goal of the upscaler is to get as close as possible to the original image (native) because by default it should be of the best quality.
It can't do better than 100%, if we say it's better then it's different from what the developer set, at which point we go in a different direction of discussion.

Are you suggesting the developer wanted that fence to flicker like crazy? If that's the case then yes, I absolutely don't wanna play how the developer intented

 

[lexluthermiester]

Happens in CP2077 as well.

No it doesn't, you're just making things up now..

Your evidence kinda proves my point

What, that you're shoveling it hard? We can see that.

 

[JustBenching]

No it doesn't, you're just making things up now..


What, that you're shoveling it hard? We can see that.

Sure bud

Spoiler

 

[lexluthermiester]

Sure bud

Spoiler

View attachment 381017

You've been handed your hat, conversationally. This is because your drivel is without merit. Take a hint.

 

[JustBenching]

I'm downloading it in 4k video and can't see what you mean. Can you explain it? And I hope you didn't watch it via youtube where the compression corrupts the picture.

You can't see the fence flickering like crazy?

 

[lexluthermiester]

You can't see the fence flickering like crazy?

And I hope you didn't watch it via youtube where the compression corrupts the picture.

Thus..

 

[EsliteMoby]

When people say "Ooh, native looks so ugly because of the blurring" what they really mean is "This game forces TAA on and it''s that looks ugly but I'll blame native instead". Native then gets an unfair reputation from people conflating two different things. But that never was necessary, and there are games that run natively without TAA that look great. If you used DLSS then forced TAA on top of that anyway, that would look a blurry mess too. Half these comparisons aren't just testing upscaling / super-sampling, they're inadvertently testing other unrelated engine quirks that gets enabled / disabled on whim on top of that, kinda reminiscent of how HDR was advertised a few years back where on top of the HDR-ness, they reduced the colour saturation on the SDR versions in side-by-side shots, to make them look artificially worse...

It would certainly be nice if we did have "actual like for comparisons" (native without TAA vs DLSS without TAA) as a frame of reference of the effect of just upscaling, but let's be polite and say "they are quite hard to find"...

You cannot use DLAA/DLSS without in-game TAA since it depends on temporal.

That's right. AI is just a marketing gimmick.

 

[wolf]

Sure but the majority of games are actually forcing TAA as far as I know. Can't even turn it off. Native without TAA would still look worse than dlss for different reasons, jaggies.

It's tough to nail down as it's a moving target in that TAA and DLSS implementation quality varies, sometimes heavily, game to game.

Broadly, I'd rank them in this order, noting it's not a linear scale just rank

What that makes clear to me is that per pixel actually being rendered and what the AA algorithm has to work with, it's obvious that the DLAA/DLSS algorithm gives better image quality than most "off-the-shelf" TAA that comes in a given game these days. This could be shifting however, as I see games starting to ship with say DLSS, FSR and XeSS and no off-the-shelf TAA at all, as any card capable of running the game will be able to use at least 1 if not 2 or all of those solutions, and sometimes offering those solutions at native resolution too which is fantastic to see. IMO FSR @ Native is on par or better than TAA @ Native too, certainly sharper but other potential drawbacks like shimmer or disocclusion artefacts, so it makes more sense to just include the modern algorithms rather than some off the developer shelf TAA. More options are welcome though and off-the-shelf TAA if it's super easy to include might as well be there I suppose.

No matter how you view Native, whether it's native res+TAA, no AA, DLAA, MSAA etc, pushing the render resolution beyond native and using a like for like AA (or none) will provide better IQ than native res - by far the largest and most relevant issue with it would have to be the rendering power required to achieve worthwhile results. I do enjoy playing older games on newer hardware and supersampling the bejesus out of them Or my owned and emulated switch games on Yuzu.

Perhaps an interesting thought to leave here on that note... When we know that there is a method (supersampling) to increase perceived quality beyond what can be achieved by rendering at a given displays native resolution, it would seem reasonable to assume that there isn't necessarily a limitation of only that one way to achieve it.