Introduction

Before the release of Farming Simulator 22, NVIDIA advertised and pushed this game as part of the lineup of new and upcoming DLSS-supported games in November. But when the game fully released, it surprisingly also had support for NVIDIA's Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing (DLAA). DLAA is NVIDIA's DLSS image enhancement technology rendered at native resolution, so improvements to quality can be expected even compared to native "default" rendering. More and more game developers have started adding DLAA support alongside DLSS; thus far, Farming Simulator 22 is the third game to fully support DLAA. In the graphics settings menu, DLAA is found under the "post-process anti-aliasing" options. This game also supports AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR).

What's also interesting about Farming Simulator 22 is that there are subtle differences in the implementation of NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), NVIDIA's Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing (DLAA), and AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), which we are keen to find out more about.



Below, you will find comparison screenshots at 4K, 1440p, 1080p, and in different DLSS/FSR quality modes; the DLAA and TAA screenshots are also available in the dropdown. For those who want to see how DLAA, DLSS, and FSR perform in motion, watch our side-by-side comparison video. The video can help uncover issues like shimmering, which are not visible in the screenshots.

All tests were made using a GeForce RTX 3080 GPU at Very High graphics settings with motion blur and depth of field disabled. DLSS in this game shipped with version 2.3.4.

Screenshots

Side by Side Comparison Video

Conclusion

In Farming Simulator 22, only the FSR implementation uses a sharpening filter in the render path. As per usual, you can't control the level of sharpening applied by FSR, but in this game, it is tuned well enough by the developers. With version 2.3, NVIDIA has added the ability for game developers to include a DLSS sharpening slider, which adds a customizable sharpening pass—the Farming Simulator 22 developers chose not to include that feature. You can still manually adjust the setting through the NVIDIA Control Panel.

While running this game at native resolution with TAA enabled, the game suffers from shimmering on steel objects and tree leaves when moving through the world. Enabling FSR makes this issue even more noticeable because FSR uses this anti-aliasing method as the basis before the FSR render pass is made. The lower the internal resolution used, the more noticeable this issue becomes with TAA/FSR enabled. DLSS also has this issue at lower resolutions, but it is way less noticeable, and you need to zoom in on the image to see it. Only by enabling DLAA are these shimmering issues completely removed even at 1080p resolution.

In Farming Simulator 22, NVIDIA's DLAA provides the best image quality by eliminating artifacts, producing less blurry images compared to TAA and more detail on thin objects and tree leaves, but at a slight performance cost. Speaking of performance, there are some issues with CPU multi-threaded performance, and high-powered GPUs such as the GeForce RTX 3080 will be CPU bottlenecked in most sequences of the game at 1440p and below. Only at 4K resolution were we able to see the performance hit DLAA causes in this game compared to TAA.