Fidelity Super Resolution in 2021

[shankly1985]

The DLSS .DLL files are interchangeable, just take the DLSS 2.2 .DLL file and copy paste into Cyberpunk and Death Stranding directory and boom instant image quality improved.

That's one thing thats cool about DLSS, the AI/DL model is stored as a .DLL file and that file can be applied to most other DLSS games without the game needing to be patched - so as long as the game supports DLSS, then whenever Nvidia releases a new version you can just update the game yourself

Mind posting some screenshots of each DLL? I would be interested in seeing the difference.

 

[Grim5]

Mind posting some screenshots of each DLL? I would be interested in seeing the difference.

In the DLSS/RTX thread others were posting comparisons

 

[LtMatt]

Q&A on FSR - don't think I've seen this posted here.

 

[Grim5]

Just tried the Riftbreaker demo.

The game doesn't have great graphics even at native which wasn't the greatest for comparison but never the less I roughly went through the various FSR presets.

Everything other than Ultra Quality looks noticeably blurry, however Ultra Quality didn't look too bad - it's still noticeable but it's not far away from Native and I'd use it on my TV - at TV viewing distance its impossible to notice the reduction in texture quality with the Ultra Quality setting but is noticeable on a PC monitor sitting at my desk.

The only other thing I could pick up on was that shimmering on the main character and on shadows was worse when FSR was enabled, where as they were there but nearly invisible on Native - I dont think FSR is introducing new shimmering, it's just making that existing shimmering more noticeable

So in summary, based on this brief test in one game - my thoughts on FSR is that the Ultra Quality setting is really good for TV gaming and I will definetly use it in games that support it when Im playing on my TV but I won't ever use it at my desk on my monitor. I think FSR for consoles will work great as most gamers use a TV

 

[Nexus18]

DF definitely coming across as bias in their video there.... Alex posted on reddit:

Alex here from Digital Foundry -

reading other reviews I think there is a general misapprehension happening about AMD's FSR in the tech press, so my review reads or watches rather differently. FSR is an image upscaling technique, like a bilinear or bicubic upscale you can do in photoshop. AMD's own tech briefing and information describes FSR as an uspcaling technique to be compared with simple image space upscalers like Bilinear or Lanczos or Bicubic. It is better than those simple upscalers for the purpose of a video game image.

AMD's FSR is not an image reconstruction technique like checkerboard rendering, DLSS 1.0, DLSS 2.0, Temporal Anti-Aliasing Upscaling, or a variety of techniques which look to reconstruct the image's higher level detail beyond the spatial realm while Anti-Aliasing that new image information.

FSR is similarly not Anti-Aliasing - FSR comes after a game has already been anti-aliased and inherits the qualities, faults, and benefits of the anti-aliasing technique of the game in question.



The questions of FSR's usefulness is important within the context of what a game offers in its settings menu. If for some reason a game literally only offers basic image upscaling with a slider that uses bilinear filtering, or none of that and just has resolution options, then FSR will produce a more pleasing image than those options. But it is not and should not be thought of as an alternative to real image reconstruction techniques.

I say this for the academic purpose of properly classifying things, but also because practically, All people who game on PC should hope that devs implement something like Temporal Anti-Aliasing Upscaling in their game and not only offer something like FSR. TAA U is doing something completely different that has transformative image quality effects and should be desired.

Just like i predicted. All the ‘dlss sucks’ ‘its so blurry’ people etcetc are now praising the inferior ( just the reality ) FSR and claiming ‘cant see any difference vs native’. Just cause it’s AMD branded.

Need a clown emoji for cases like these.

Yup it's popcorn worthy but as per usual, it's always this way:

- fury x 4gb hbm vram vs nvidia higher slower vram (exact same arguments happening now but the other way round)
- free vs g sync
- tessellation fiasco

Now it just happens to be upscaling related....

Who actually? Far as I know DLSS 2.0 is highly regarded.

It's pretty easy to read between the lines with certain amd loyal fans on here who didn't like dlss, even 2.0, even just comments of "nvidias crutch", "would never use this as it just lowers resolution", "not a patch on native", "it's just the equivalent to a resolution slider" etc. etc. shows their distaste of nvidia/dlss but with FSR, said users are......

"wow this is really impressive, great performance gain with little to no drop in IQ", "game changer", "really well done AMD", "way better than resorting to dropping resolution"

etc. etc.

All whilst ignoring the flaws that FSR does have, of which there is still more than dlss 2.2 right now, obviously these will get addressed over time though.

Mind posting some screenshots of each DLL? I would be interested in seeing the difference.

Loads of good comparison on nvidias sub reddit.

Personally I have only done it for cyberpunk but the difference is pretty substantial in terms of motion/ghosting now, it really bothered me before with car tail lights (not as much as days gone, rdr 2 TAA ghosting but I digress....), now I hardly notice, if at all... unless really pixel peeping. In terms of the sharpness/clarity and static shots, it is definitely sharper looking/more clear, however, feels like over sharpening to me now, which I'm not a fan of.

FSR looks very good though, far better than I was expecting, given the choice:

- I'll still use dlss where possible
- dlss quality for 1440p and dlss quality/balanced @ 4k (maybe dlss performance if a really demanding rtx game @ 4k)
- if dlss isn't in a game, then I'll only use FSR ultra/quality mode when gaming on my 4k oled and if on my 3440x1440 monitor, then I'll only use ultra quality option

 

[ICDP]

Just tried the Riftbreaker demo.

The game doesn't have great graphics even at native which wasn't the greatest for comparison but never the less I roughly went through the various FSR presets.

Everything other than Ultra Quality looks noticeably blurry, however Ultra Quality didn't look too bad - it's still noticeable but it's not far away from Native and I'd use it on my TV - at TV viewing distance its impossible to notice the reduction in texture quality with the Ultra Quality setting but is noticeable on a PC monitor sitting at my desk.

The only other thing I could pick up on was that shimmering on the main character and on shadows was worse when FSR was enabled, where as they were there but nearly invisible on Native - I dont think FSR is introducing new shimmering, it's just making that existing shimmering more noticeable

So in summary, based on this brief test in one game - my thoughts on FSR is that the Ultra Quality setting is really good for TV gaming and I will definetly use it in games that support it when Im playing on my TV but I won't ever use it at my desk on my monitor. I think FSR for consoles will work great as most gamers use a TV

A good assessment of what it can do. What resolution were you using? I find at 4K Ultra was very good and even quality more than OK, with Ultra being very close to native but there was some very minor blurring. At 1080p it was clearly not as good.

 

[timorous]

everything gets called AI today when in fact AI does not exist and never has

Mu Zero is pretty close. Taught itself to play several games (atari, chess, go, shogi) then taught itself to become super human in most of those games and matched or exceeded the AlphaZero model.

Edit.

So combining FSR with VSR/DSR seems to work pretty well from the limited testing I have seen. Set your VSR to 2x to render a 1080p image at 4k, set FSR to performance to make your 4k image from the native 1080p image and you end up with a 1080p image that is better than native at the similar performance.

 

[nvidiamd]

Mu Zero is pretty close. Taught itself to play several games (atari, chess, go, shogi) then taught itself to become super human in most of those games and matched or exceeded the AlphaZero model.

I am sure it did that because it was bored and didn't had anything better to do, not because it was "guided" to learn how to play or how to become "super human".

 

[Nexus18]

Agree with the "AI" comments, working in a tech./dev. team where we have an "AI" area, it is really just machine learning and "training" algorithms.

 

[Grim5]

Mu Zero is pretty close. Taught itself to play several games (atari, chess, go, shogi) then taught itself to become super human in most of those games and matched or exceeded the AlphaZero model.

Edit.

So combining FSR with VSR/DSR seems to work pretty well from the limited testing I have seen. Set your VSR to 2x to render a 1080p image at 4k, set FSR to performance to make your 4k image from the native 1080p image and you end up with a 1080p image that is better than native at the similar performance.

I guess though a true AI would be able to not only teach itself but to do so on the fly and making reasonable decision that can match or beat those of a human without knowing the rules or having easily definable rules - like chess as a game and like most games have very simple and easily defined rules, so you might be able to teach a smart gorilla to play chess at some rudimentary level - but Tesla no matter how hard they try can't get a car to self drive off road and make reasonable decision over changing terrain and with no rules that are easily defined.

If I give a robot a pile of bricks, not telling it what it is or what to do, will it learn to build a house for shelter? I think to do this the AI needs to have an understanding of what it is, what the world is and what it's place is in the world

 

[Grim5]

Agree with the "AI" comments, working in a tech./dev. team where we have an "AI" area, it is really just machine learning and "training" algorithms.

Same here and we call them "AI" or machine learning but the reality is that we're just making a prediction model based on historical data, the software isn't intelligent, it has no technical or emotional IQ that I can measure, it's just getting more accurate and predicting an outcome the more historical data it gets - if we don't give it historical data it's useless and a human will beat it

 

[D.P.]

Just tried the Riftbreaker demo.

The game doesn't have great graphics even at native which wasn't the greatest for comparison but never the less I roughly went through the various FSR presets.

Everything other than Ultra Quality looks noticeably blurry, however Ultra Quality didn't look too bad - it's still noticeable but it's not far away from Native and I'd use it on my TV - at TV viewing distance its impossible to notice the reduction in texture quality with the Ultra Quality setting but is noticeable on a PC monitor sitting at my desk.

The only other thing I could pick up on was that shimmering on the main character and on shadows was worse when FSR was enabled, where as they were there but nearly invisible on Native - I dont think FSR is introducing new shimmering, it's just making that existing shimmering more noticeable

So in summary, based on this brief test in one game - my thoughts on FSR is that the Ultra Quality setting is really good for TV gaming and I will definetly use it in games that support it when Im playing on my TV but I won't ever use it at my desk on my monitor. I think FSR for consoles will work great as most gamers use a TV

Yes, FSR doesn't cause shimmering but will magnify such problems. For temporal stability TAA has to be applied, because FSR is not a replacement for TAA unlike DLSS. The flip side is you exchange the shimmering pixels for ghosting and some blur caused by TAA, which FSR will magnify.

 

[Harlequin]

I can see the `next gen` for both red and green team, leaning on DirectML for improvements; simply being - why use a proprietary solution , which costs money to get others to use it - when a tool kit is already available.

 

[D.P.]

Agree with the "AI" comments, working in a tech./dev. team where we have an "AI" area, it is really just machine learning and "training" algorithms.

That is the definition of what AI is. Ml is a sub-set of AI. So what do you expect

You seem to be confused by differences between Strong and Weak AI. All AI used in actual production systems is weak AI - algorithms making intelligent decisions by any means necessary, usual based on data science and ML. Strong AI is a bit of a niche research area for academic, cognitive scientists, etc. Doesn't have any practical application in today's world. It is also more philosophical. There are many similaraities in the way deep learning CNNs can recognize objects and thw way the human brain does, but there are also large differences. The hardware is fundamentally different, so having differences is not unexpected. And at the end of the day does the process matter, or do the results mater? In industry, only the latter counts

 

[D.P.]

I can see the `next gen` for both red and green team, leaning on DirectML for improvements; simply being - why use a proprietary solution , which costs money to get others to use it - when a tool kit is already available.

Rather than a universal DirectML model that is common to all IHVs and games, it would be best if a common API can be made in Direct ML and each IHV can provide their own model, or the game devs can provide a specific model. This way you drive innovation and don't restrict the technology to some common subset. Essentially the last N frames, depth maps and motion vectors are passed in to the API and the upscaled frame comes out. IF AMD doesn't want to use temporal accumulation then they ignore the prior frames.

 

[nvidiamd]

Would need more examples for the quality of RT reflections - I've not noticed anything atrocious.

Look i've found another video from Alex Shilltaglia where he talks about this for 30 seconds.
@ 12:35

So really we use upscaling because we can't play games at 4k with RT on. But the main feature the RT will never be rendered at 4K, we can look around and pretend everything looks close to native or even better but the truth is if we play at 1080p, we will have the same quality of RT.
And then we compare PC native vs console rt reflections res and we laugh about consoles because they use lower RT resolutions.

 

[D.P.]

DF definitely coming across as bias in their video there.... Alex posted on reddit:

What Alex posted is spot on though. It is an accurate description of what FSR is, and what it does and does not do.

Alex here from Digital Foundry -

reading other reviews I think there is a general misapprehension happening about AMD's FSR in the tech press, so my review reads or watches rather differently. FSR is an image upscaling technique, like a bilinear or bicubic upscale you can do in photoshop. AMD's own tech briefing and information describes FSR as an uspcaling technique to be compared with simple image space upscalers like Bilinear or Lanczos or Bicubic. It is better than those simple upscalers for the purpose of a video game image.

AMD's FSR is not an image reconstruction technique like checkerboard rendering, DLSS 1.0, DLSS 2.0, Temporal Anti-Aliasing Upscaling, or a variety of techniques which look to reconstruct the image's higher level detail beyond the spatial realm while Anti-Aliasing that new image information.

FSR is similarly not Anti-Aliasing - FSR comes after a game has already been anti-aliased and inherits the qualities, faults, and benefits of the anti-aliasing technique of the game in question.



The questions of FSR's usefulness is important within the context of what a game offers in its settings menu. If for some reason a game literally only offers basic image upscaling with a slider that uses bilinear filtering, or none of that and just has resolution options, then FSR will produce a more pleasing image than those options. But it is not and should not be thought of as an alternative to real image reconstruction techniques.

I say this for the academic purpose of properly classifying things, but also because practically, All people who game on PC should hope that devs implement something like Temporal Anti-Aliasing Upscaling in their game and not only offer something like FSR. TAA U is doing something completely different that has transformative image quality effects and should be desired.

 

[shankly1985]

What it does or doesn't do is useless when what he pointed on on their video that FSR include shimmering.
But this isn't true going by another video posted by kit guru

 

[nvidiamd]

Personally I have only done it for cyberpunk but the difference is pretty substantial in terms of motion/ghosting now, it really bothered me before with car tail lights (not as much as days gone, rdr 2 TAA ghosting but I digress....), now I hardly notice, if at all... unless really pixel peeping. I

Some people say it is still happening even with 2.2 hack.

https://twitter.com/Charcharo/status/1407634237004652544
But i agree it is barely noticeable.

 

[LtMatt]

Some people say it is still happening even with 2.2 hack.

https://twitter.com/Charcharo/status/1407634237004652544
But i agree it is barely noticeable.

That looks bad, the image also looks very grainy?