Upscaling methods comparison

[MASTAN]

Quality setting

* DLSS https://disk.yandex.com/i/IjCRvc4RNtfJRg
* TSR https://disk.yandex.com/i/DGOlZpuT7nqB6g
* XeSS https://disk.yandex.com/i/eVO6rXPpvVACfg
* FSR https://disk.yandex.com/i/_oENZffsDiUL1A
* TAAU https://disk.yandex.com/i/6BjmQfJu7XW2pg

Native setting

* DLSS(DLAA actually) https://disk.yandex.com/i/Onm9fZ4gRTEevg
* TSR https://disk.yandex.com/i/DGOlZpuT7nqB6g
* TAAU https://disk.yandex.com/i/qnM3qdooqWpJXQ

Sorted by the order of image stability from best to worst.

[Serpent]

Thank you so much for taking the time to compare all these upscaling methods and sharing the results with us. It's incredibly useful for me with an older graphics card that doesn't support DLSS to see how it compares to the other methods.

[playful_tux]

Thanks Mastan, I think this is a topic worth discussing.

I wonder why TAAU is an option. It seems to me that TSR makes a better job in every case (and I don't mean just in these videos, but also in all the tests I did myself), and I don't see less CPU/GPU usage with TAAU compared to TSR. (Not that I did very accurate measurements though, I just keep an eye on the global usage percentage.)

And there are other things to test: while moving (for ghosting and flickering effects), and at lower "upsampling presets". (No I am not saying Mastan should record every combination, that's a lot of work! Plus everyone has different hardware and wants something different.)

Given that a key goal of upsampling is to improve performance by rendering (internally) at lower res, I would expect significant gains in CPU/GPU usage when the visual quality is significantly degraded, but that's not what I saw (again, in my own tests). The main gain seems to be when degrading from "native" to quality, and not much after that.

I see a bigger performance gain from reducing the window size, with quality less degraded, than with the most aggressive upsampling settings.

[MASTAN]

At lower presets it only gets worse. I tested some of them but didn't make videos.

[Liam Pope]

Can someone explain to an old fart who's been out of gaming for several years producing future gamers what the hell any of this even is?! :)

I have the one setting on native cos that was default, and played with TSR and TAAU on the other setting and all I noticed is TSR has some weird wrong looking laser beam reflections of walls that make no sense.

Thanks.

[Kein Zantezuken]

Originally posted by playful_tux:

I wonder why TAAU is an option. It seems to me that TSR makes a better job in every case (and I don't mean just in these videos, but also in all the tests I did myself), and I don't see less CPU/GPU usage with TAAU compared to TSR. (Not that I did very accurate measurements though, I just keep an eye on the global usage percentage.)

if you are willing to disable TTAU and fallback to classic TAA and tweak it, you can get native res quality and comparable in performance to highest acceptable TSR percentage scale. You can make it fairly sharp, and the only issue will be inevitable ghosting during framedrops.

TSR also has higher overhead on older HW, like GTX1000 series.

[MASTAN]

Originally posted by Liam Pope:

Can someone explain to an old fart who's been out of gaming for several years producing future gamers what the hell any of this even is?! :)

I have the one setting on native cos that was default, and played with TSR and TAAU on the other setting and all I noticed is TSR has some weird wrong looking laser beam reflections of walls that make no sense.

Thanks.

It's mostly about upscaling, i.e. game renders at lower resolution and then upscales picture to the desktop resolution and thus produces a higher framerate. Some older games did this in a simpler way with a simple bilinear upscaling, then new tech appeared like DLSS, FSR, XeSS, TSR,... They use additional information generated by the game like motion vectors and temporal data to produce a better result. But they may fail here or there and sometimes produce shimmering and/or ghosting.

[Liam Pope]

Originally posted by MASTAN:

Originally posted by Liam Pope:

Can someone explain to an old fart who's been out of gaming for several years producing future gamers what the hell any of this even is?! :)

I have the one setting on native cos that was default, and played with TSR and TAAU on the other setting and all I noticed is TSR has some weird wrong looking laser beam reflections of walls that make no sense.

Thanks.

It's mostly about upscaling, i.e. game renders at lower resolution and then upscales picture to the desktop resolution and thus produces a higher framerate. Some older games did this in a simpler way with a simple bilinear upscaling, then new tech appeared like DLSS, FSR, XeSS, TSR,... They use additional information generated by the game like motion vectors and temporal data to produce a better result. But they may fail here or there and sometimes produce shimmering and/or ghosting.

Thanks. Well the description in the menu sounded just like that, so that was what I thought! What confused me was I would have thought the 'native' setting was just old school render everything in the chosen resolution, i.e. this upsampling would effectively be off. But I guess that's not right, cos if upsampling was off, why would the upsampling method setting - TSR and TAAU - do anything?? So what does upscaling set to native mean?

[MASTAN]

Native means it becomes some form of anti-aliasing. It can be unstable for the same reason TAA(temporal anti-aliasing) can be unstable.
DLSS native is officially called DLAA.

[Liam Pope]

Originally posted by MASTAN:

Native means it becomes some form of anti-aliasing. It can be unstable for the same reason TAA(temporal anti-aliasing) can be unstable.
DLSS native is officially called DLAA.

Ah I see. Thanks!

[joridiculous]

Originally posted by MASTAN:

Native means it becomes some form of anti-aliasing. It can be unstable for the same reason TAA(temporal anti-aliasing) can be unstable.
DLSS native is officially called DLAA.

DLSS and DLAA are two different things.
DLSS is up scaling (Super Sampling), DLAA is Not up scaling at all (Anti Aliasing).
For picture quality you cant really beat DLAA, but it also needs a lot of power. and it is newer a "native" setting. And very few games supports DLAA "out of the box"

[MASTAN]

Originally posted by joridiculous:

DLSS and DLAA are two different things.
DLSS is up scaling (Super Sampling), DLAA is Not up scaling at all (Anti Aliasing).
For picture quality you cant really beat DLAA, but it also needs a lot of power. and it is newer a "native" setting. And very few games supports DLAA "out of the box"

That's what I said above, that with native resolution all those upscaling methods become some form of antialiasing.
DLAA is DLSS with native resolution. Yes it doesn't have upscaling part but everything else is the same. That's why you can use DLSSTweaks utility to use DLAA for games that don't have DLAA option and only DLSS.

In Talos 2 Demo DLAA is used when you choose DLSS and set quality to Native. That's why in the first post I wrote "Native DLSS" and added DLAA in parentheses.

FSR 3 introduced "Native AA" option btw while FSR 2 doesn't have it.

DLAA doesn't need a lot of power if you forget about upscaling and only think about regular games and the usual antialiasing methods. Game renders aliased picture and then it goes through tensor cores. Fps should be slightly less than the same game with antialiasing turned off.

[joridiculous]

DLAA and DLSS is two completely different things. The only two things they have in common is its NVIDIA tech and Deep Learning and BOTH use the same pipeline, share the same AI-driven anti-aliasing method and can therefor NOT be used together.

DLAA do no Upscale OR downscale what so ever, it uses the native resolution settings you chose and add Anti Aliasing.

DLAA focuses on image quality at the cost of performance m while DLSS focus on Performance before image quality (render at lower resolution before upscaling to "native").

(DLAA is advanced TAA). TAA only collects one sample per pixel, DLAA (AI) track motion, lighting changes, and edges throughout the scene and make adjustments accordingly.

DLAA replaces all the other AA-methods in a game supporting it. (you can mod some games to use DLAA)

DLAA is also exclusive to Nvidia’s RTX GPUs. (20-40 series)

[Ap2000]

Originally posted by MASTAN:

At lower presets it only gets worse. I tested some of them but didn't make videos.

Anything but the highest setting for FSR & DLSS is incredibly ugly anyway.
I don't think anybody uses the performance modes.

[MASTAN]

Originally posted by joridiculous:

DLAA and DLSS is two completely different things. The only two things they have in common is its NVIDIA tech and Deep Learning and BOTH use the same pipeline, share the same AI-driven anti-aliasing method and can therefor NOT be used together.

Like I previously said, technically DLAA is just a special case of DLSS. They all differ only by ratio and preset.
DLSS Ultra Performance: ratio is 1/3, preset F by default
DLSS Performance: ratio is 1/2, preset D by default
DLLS Balanced: ratio is 0.58, preset D by default
DLSS Quality: ratio is 2/3, preset D by default
DLLS Native/DLAA: ratio is 1, preset F by default

DLSS/DLAA require the game to be rendered without antialiasing and applies its own kind of antialiasing. You could say DLAA applies only antialiasing while DLSS both upscales and applies antialiasing.

[Liam Pope]

So confusing! :) So if these upscaling methods are still in operation even when we choose native so we don't actually do any upscaling, they just do some AA instead, then what is the other AA setting for? Is that doing some old school AA like actually render higher res then downscale? Or is that not done these days? Does the AA setting also control these methods we are discussing?