The Nvidia 970 vs AMD 290 question!

[Rroff]

Seems a reasonable price for the performance, lets hope I'm not disappointed, and by the way, whats DSR?

"Dynamic Super Resolution" aka Downsampling/Downscaling.

Basically it renders the game at a higher resolution than your monitor's native resolution then scales it down to display it at native resolution - this like "super sampling" means there is more data to play with to smooth out jagged edges (anti-aliasing) but with DSR it also tries to preserve some of that extra information to make distant textures look crisper, etc. and unlike traditional methods of downscaling it uses a more intelligent filtering to try and preserve as much of the detail as possible that would normally be averaged out of existence when combining a larger number of pixels into a smaller number.

From my experience so far when using DSR to render the game at 4K type resolutions and then display it at 2560x1440 it does a fairly convincing job in a lot of games of giving the perception that the game is running at a 4K resolution - at least for ~28" monitor sizes - I suspect on larger displays the difference would be a bit more discernible.

 

[pieman109]

My old Iiyama 24 incher (ooer missus) is only 1080p so I'm assuming it'd work well at that res with DSR?

 

[Rroff]

The hit is pretty big - using 3840x2160 DSR on a single fairly decently clocked 780 BF4 with full ultra settings minus AA runs at 30-40fps much of the time on a moderately busy server.

 

[pieman109]

So going by that, the hit at 1080p would be minimal?

 

[setter]

The hit is pretty big - using 3840x2160 DSR on a single fairly decently clocked 780 BF4 with full ultra settings minus AA runs at 30-40fps much of the time on a moderately busy server.

Even on sli 780's it's just playable with a mix of medium/high settings, though my cards are at stock. AA is still a no go.

 

[SS-89]

So going by that, the hit at 1080p would be minimal?

Think you are misunderstanding the tech. You essentially ignore what res your screen is and render up to 4x the number of pixels. The screen scaling will automaticaly scale the image back down to 1080p but your graphics cards will be pumping out at 4k. So even if your screen is 1080p you could be rendering 4k which will roughly quarter the performance you'd normally get rendering at your normal resolution of 1080p.

The benefit of this? Well it produces a much sharper image, you have to see it in person to truly appreciate the difference. Also it negates the need for AA and I prefer using DSR and no aa vs 1080 and 4xmsaa.

 

[Rroff]

Think you are misunderstanding the tech. You essentially ignore what res your screen is and render up to 4x the number of pixels. The screen scaling will automaticaly scale the image back down to 1080p but your graphics cards will be pumping out at 4k. So even if your screen is 1080p you could be rendering 4k which will roughly quarter the performance you'd normally get rendering at your normal resolution of 1080p.

That is how normal downscaling works (assuming its not using a CPU based scaling which is another story really) but DSR is a bit different - AFAIK it presents the final image at native resolution to the monitor without doing any of the normal display or GPU scaling and instead renders the game at the DSR factor resolution and uses filters on the GPU to rescale it to native res (without using the normal GPU scaler) then passes to the monitor as normal hence the improved image quality.

 

[SS-89]

That is how normal downscaling works (assuming its not using a CPU based scaling which is another story really) but DSR is a bit different - AFAIK it presents the final image at native resolution to the monitor without doing any of the normal display or GPU scaling and instead renders the game at the DSR factor resolution and uses filters on the GPU to rescale it to native res (without using the normal GPU scaler) then passes to the monitor as normal hence the improved image quality.

I knew it went through a 13tap gaussian filter but wasn't aware it did that. Regardless I remember seeing a comparison with regular downsampling on another forum and the gpu hit was roughly the same so either way you will see a large performance hit at 4k when rendering above your native res of 1080p.

I up the res on my screen until I can't maintain 60fps. Which is near enough 4k most of the time