Deep Learning Super Sampling

[Dixon Sider]

I read here:
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/09/01/confirmed-ray-tracing-and-dlss-games-so-far/
That SS4 will have DLSS. I wonder if there are any plans to give the game ray tracing? Since they are both RTX babies.

[ExTaZzY]

CT confirmed on the discord server that it won't have Ray Tracing. But let's be glad that it has DLSS. That will make the game look a bit better and will give performance boost. Wish I had RTX too.

[Dixon Sider]

Ya that is nuts. I bet some super nerd can figure out how to add ray tracing in there if they give us some powerful modding utilities. That is so exciting to see DLSS in here.

[SkacikPL]

Well it doesn't have to have it on launch but it would be nice if they'd consider some of this tech for the long run. It seems that with next-gen consoles, NVIDIA 3000 series and AMD doing something RT capable on GPU market, Raytracing is finally a reality so if SS4 sells well and is worth of being maintained i don't see why they wouldn't consider it.

Especially once they start considering PS5/Xbox versions where everyone will expect RT of some shape.

[Dixon Sider]

That is a really good point. Thank god for consoles lol. Between RT and NVMe SSDs they are really pushing the gaming industry into better tech. I imagine PC games are made with SATA III SSDs in mind, but console games will be made with NVMe in mind. Same with RT. Not many PC games have the tech yet because not many people have the hardware. In a few months the hardware will be everywhere. Go embedded systems!

[Warmonger]

I was hoping that SS4 gets merged with Fusion, then Fusion gets all the DLSS and eventually ray tracing.
But now we can only wait and see.

[Dixon Sider]

That would be pretty sweet too. I think it would give noobies to RT like myself a very nice scope of the technology by seeing it done on an older game. Like Quake 2. The game is 25 years old but it is still on display for new GPU announcements lol. Legendary.

[Dixon Sider]

I have been looking at different anti aliasing methods and I am not as excited for DLSS as I was when I was reading about it. I am finding that other anti aliasing methods are actually making my image look worse when testing it. I think the higher resolution you go, the less of a benefit AA is. I know DLSS is supposed to be different in how it works, but I am not sold on the concept yet. To me it just sounds like an advancement to anti aliasing when we don't really need it for modern monitors.

Hopefully the game will make it easy to compare exact pictures with and without it. I can see Monster Hunter World updating in real time as I go through the different AA options and the least blurry choice by a long shot is off.

[SkacikPL]

Primary benefit of DLSS is not functioning as AA method but effectively allowing the engine to render at between 50 to 75% of target resolution and allowing the "AI" to fill in the gaps supposedly giving results as good as or better as native rendering.

That alone makes it somewhat desirable in performance starved scenario, especially in context of raytracing where the cost scales directly with target resolution so cutting pixel count by 50% nets a solid performance boost.

Also compared to other mainly used AA method in modern engines - TAA, DLSS is not temporal and as such it does not suffer from ghosting that increases exponentially as framerate drops.

[Dixon Sider]

Originally posted by SkacikPL:

Primary benefit of DLSS is not functioning as AA method but effectively allowing the engine to render at between 50 to 75% of target resolution and allowing the "AI" to fill in the gaps supposedly giving results as good as or better as native rendering.

That alone makes it somewhat desirable in performance starved scenario, especially in context of raytracing where the cost scales directly with target resolution so cutting pixel count by 50% nets a solid performance boost.

OK, so lets say I am running it on a 4k monitor. I would basically be telling my computer to run that at 1080p --> communicate with DLSS --> display it on the monitor at 4k. If I understand what you are saying.

I think where my skepticism comes from is "where is the image quality benefit people mention?" The image quality getting better is going to completely depend on the level of detail the graphic artists want to go. Like how far do they want to zoom in on the pixels to blend them or w/e it is they do. If the graphic artists do a good job of blending the colors together, DLSS would potentially harm the image quality.

[Dixon Sider]

IDK enough about graphic art though. I imagine there will be artists out there that can out perform the DLSS fidelity.

[SkacikPL]

This pretty much goes as far as you want to believe it.
On principle it falls close to methods like TAA, FXAA, SMAA and all of the "post-process" methods in the way that it's essentially more or less educated guesswork on how the gaps in the scene should be filled.

Traditional AA methods like SSAA truly did render entire scene at X times the resolution in order to scale it down with gaps filled using averaged (so there was actual data to begin with, rather than a guess).

Of course backbone to DLSS is entirely different given it's a pretrained AI model but in the end it's still a guessing game for the machine.
If you want to ask me, you can never substitute "true" data with a guess but DLSS 2.0 had some truly impressive examples where it produced image that had more clarity than native 4k image from same game.

As to whether it's the case where really DLSS is that good at guessing or it just disables other stuff that would make natively rendered image blurrier is up to anyones guess (as usually DLSS cannot be ran along TAA).

[Dixon Sider]

I just feel like the approach for the tech is wrong in my opinion. I could very well be wrong, and that would be great. But the way I see it is when you look at the scenario where this is fully adopted everywhere, that would mean developers can not go too far into detail with their graphic art. They would have to leave some room for DLSS to work its magic, and that could also save on some horsepower. I think we are betting on the wrong horse when it comes to this topic. No artificial intelligence will ever be able to create art better than a human can. It is the key benefit to being a human. Our imagination and free will.

Now maybe the performance benefit will be enough that we can say "hey, just zoom in 50% less" or something like that to the artists and it will be better overall. We will see. I remain skeptical until I can play around with it myself on a wide variety of products.

[Dixon Sider]

Or maybe they just shouldn't have marketed it as an image quality benefit lol. I can see it sticking for the performance boost without having to change the way images are drawn.

[Rasta]

where did Croteam confirm that ss4 will support dlss?

[Dixon Sider]

Originally posted by Rasta Pedobear (your dad):

where did Croteam confirm that ss4 will support dlss?

I linked an article in the OP