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Nvidia's new DSR and MSAA - My findings

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Been playing with my 970's over the last few weeks and more specifically, DSR.

As we all know certain games are performance hogs when using traditional multi-sample anti-aliasing.

This is mainly due to pretty much every modern game moving to a deferred renderer, which is only going to become the norm for game engines.

That's where DSR comes in, from my testing it's actually much cheaper from a performance point of view to run 2xMSAA+2xTrSAA with at least 1.2x DSR factor then running straight 4xMSAA and 8xMSAA.

And because of what DSR is you end up with better image quality then MSAA can produce anyway. Higher IQ with higher frame rates can't be bad can it?

Case in point, Hitman Absolution, a game that's known to eat VRAM and performance for breakfast when you run 4xMSAA or higher.

My 970's actually run faster with 2xMSAA+2xTrSSAA+2.0x DSR factor ( Rendering at 4k ) then running the game with straight 4xMSAA or 8xMSAA at my native resolution at 1440p. Even my old R290 had a massive drop when running 4xMSAA or above.

In fact at the above the settings the game is locked at 60fps with V-sync I've halfway through the game and have yet to see it drop.

So my lovelies, learn to LOVE and use DSR and the next time you turn on MSAA and your frame rate dies, turn the MSAA down and try turning DSR on :D
 
could you not record some footage via shadowplay and upload in 60fps to youtube ;) I know youtube compression isn't the best, but it should still give an idea, especially if you render out at a higher resoultion
 
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DSR is something I would really like to see on AMD side... Unlike the normal DownSampling that effects the refresh rate vs the Res I believe DSR works with all resolutions and doesn't effect the refresh rate.

Screenshots will show the level of AA improvements so it would be nice if you could add some screenshots even if you think we wont see the difference..
AA should stand out
 
What you would have to do with screenies...as your dsr screen should be at native render resolution, pixel wise. Is take that screen and do a lossless resize to what your native resolution with AA is. So of native was 1920x1080 you'd resize the 3840x2160 (or what ever it is) back to 1920x1080.

I think this should give you reasonable comparison.
 
Maybe its the games i play (tf2,dota2,d3) but i cant seem to find that golden ratio for smoothness vs dsr, its always either too blurry or too sharp.
 
It should be noticeable from a standstill, i put 200% resolution scale in bf4 and its instantly noticeable.

He is on about comparing screens. A 4k image on a 1080P screen won't look as good as a 4K image on a 4K screen for instance. When you shrink it to compare, you need to do what PGI is saying and try not to lose quality on the shrinkage.

I remember doing some 4K screens and people saying it looks rubbish, but that was because I didn't shrink them to show what is actually being seen from my perspective.
 
He is on about comparing screens. A won't look as good as a 4K image on a 4K screen for instance. When you shrink it to compare, you need to do what PGI is saying and try not to lose quality on the shrinkage.

I remember doing some 4K screens and people saying it looks rubbish, but that was because I didn't shrink them to show what is actually being seen from my perspective.

Yes 4k image on a 1080P screen will not look as good as on a 4k screen, we know that already, we have been seeing down scaled images for years.
 
Do you really need any AA with DSR?

I run my games at 2x DSR res on my 21:9 screen so effectively 5120 x 2160 and hardly see any jaggies so just turn AA off altogether..
 
I'll try do some screen comparisons my self when I get time, iirc a while back I did some Bf4 comparison screenies using the resolution scaling feature, scaled to 200% (4k) was vastly superior image quality over 1080/4xmsaa
 
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