Poll: How do you game? Upscaling or native? (updated poll choices - 24/12, revote!)

[Nexus18]

I'm not going to gather data for you. It didn't look to me like it was all AMD owners skewing the results. And it doesn't look like it 2nd time around either.


It didn't really change the outcome, but once you realized it was still nvidia users voting native you starting throwing shade about native + TAA sucks


As many , many people have already tried to tell you, Its not a "one size fits all" solution. Gamers consider many different things before arriving at their decision.
If you use an upscaler in your day to day gaming its obviously a preference or people are being raped of pixels.


Depends on what you want to get out of it. So only you can answer that

It wasn't about amd owners "skewing" results, it was about trying to figure out if the poll was just amd users voting and thanks to my poll change, you now know that nvidia users are also voting and also the majority of the vote for native are nvidia owners.

No, the whole native + TAA sucks came from a group of us discussing about DLAA and then DLDSR + DLSS to overcome TAA issues.

That is true hence why it's a hard poll to decide options for hence why I made it as a "how you game on a daily basis", as in average play, hence why I also stated this in the OP AGAIN so as to understand the poll votes better and see where people come from in their reasoning:

gpu -
res -
reason you use your chosen upscaling tech or native -

There is no need for a poll, I can tell you right now that the overwhelming majority of people will only use DLSS/FSR if they need to, like if the game has poor performance or has a crappy taa/fxaa implementation.

There is no point in putting a poll on this forum anyway. There are are too many fanboys for both brands that render the results of any poll meaningless. Besides the poll threads usually end up like this one has, pages and pages of fanboy arguments back and forth. And the only people who are going to take any notice of the poll are those fanboys whose agenda/brand that the poll results seem to support.

One thing this poll doesn't cover is the type of games people play. As shown, most games from the last 4 years at least.... have awful AA options and usually always TAA forced or the only viable option is TAA but alas, people vote native so they must be playing older games or making do with TAA or using other AA options if present.

That and as shown, most games do have poor performance on release day/week/month these days which is ever more reason to use upscaling unless again, people rather sacrifice graphical settings, which may very well be the case.

 

[Nexus18]

DF/Alex is creating a video on TAA:

Gonna be good.

 

[Nexus18]

I should probably get the native taa or native no taa one in before Alex releases his analytical in depth video tbh

 

[Nexus18]

Wrong thread? This one's about what upscaler you use in your day to day.

Imagine you had been first in creating the dedicated thread on TAA.

Just trying to be petty to start an argument again that no one really cares for?

Thread is about "NATIVE" too and TAA as proven is associated with NATIVE.



Don't like it, feel free to create a new thread.

 

[Nexus18]

Any one that actually goes into options menu in games will turn taa off.
I'm native and never use fxaa or taa for AA.
It's native with no AA or msaa or smaa if they are an option or just use true super sample techniques.

Taa is not associated with native, sounds like some one is trying to force a narrative for dlss.

I agree taa looks bad and arguably worse then dlss but no one should use taa.

Some of the games I play actually still retain render scale that goes above 100% and can force in game 200% render scale, something all games should have like world of Warcraft.

And what about the games where you can't turn off AA in game menu (which is usually TAA)? And sometimes even going through config files, it's not possible.

When you enable TAA, what does your render res say in game? And when DLSS/FSR/XESS are enabled, what does the render res. say?

What should people who can't stand/are sensitive to shimmering, aliasing, jaggies and general temporal stability use?

Super sampling is all very well for maybe old games or the very few non demanding games released today but what about the demanding games where that's not possible? (even 4090 wouldn't be capable of this for most titles unless you don't care for >60 fps)

 

[Nexus18]

I play mostly native when I can and I'm fine with TAA stability - it often is more stable than DLSS (the latter still has ghosting in some games) and it's definitely better than post process AA methods (much more stable in movement and often not more blurry than FXAA). Problem is that it's blurry often but that's where I use sharpening filters (either from NvCP or GE) to combat that. DLSS can be just as blurry or worse in some titles - example is Warthunder where TAA is considerably less blurry and more temporarily stable than DLSS. Of course there's also DLDSR but that one comes with downsides that I just refuse to put up with so not for me - even though image quality is great.

In some games DLSS looks really good and better than TAA - it's not a rule for me, though. In the end it all depends on implementation by devs of each method.

If you haven't already, it's worth experimenting with different presets for DLSS as ever since nvidia introduced this preset concept, nvidias' guide:

Preset A: Intended for Performance/Balanced/Quality modes. An older variant best suited to combat ghosting for elements with missing inputs, such as motion vectors.

Preset B: Intended for Ultra Performance mode. Similar to Preset A but for Ultra Performance mode.

Preset C (most preferred): Intended for Performance/Balanced/Quality modes. Generally favors current frame information; well suited for fast-paced game content.

Preset D (2nd preferred): Default preset for Performance/Balanced/Quality modes; generally favors image stability.

Preset E: A development model that is not currently used.

Preset F: Default preset for Ultra Performance and DLAA modes.

But devs are tending to use the D preset, where as the C preset often works out better (especially for lower res. or/and lower presets) e.g.

Personally I haven't encountered one instance where TAA ever looks better than DLSS and if it is, it's because of the DLSS preset not being the C preset.

Not a huge fan of sharpening filters, they can be good for the cases where there is extreme blur issues because of TAA but more often than not, they just increase the artifacts with halo'ing, shimmering and so on, which is present in the base/native frame.

I got into the once human beta recently and sadly it's AA choices are awful, SMAA (shimmering and jaggy mess and somehow still blurry) and the TAA doesn't fix jaggies and is even worse for blur. Devs are going to be including dlss here though so will be interesting to see how it does, for now, I've forced 4x msaa via nvidia control panel.

 

[Nexus18]

I was not aware of these presets with DLSS! Good to know!

Sadly, Warthunder has really weird approach to diss - it's both very blurry even on quality settings (and library in it is sensibly recent), with very obvious ghosting and other visual issues included. In this case, even though also blurry, TAA just looks considerably better. DLDRS looks even better (and then DLSS isn't too bad on quality) when on max setting but has too many downsides for me to use it. There's a few games like that in general though they are less and less common as time passes, gladly.

Regarding sharpening and haloing - here AMD has big advantage with 0 FPS loss, no haloing etc. CAS. Comparable sharpening+ from GFE has considerable performance hit even on 4090.

Yeah definetly always worth experimenting with DLSS now, nvidia ****** up when they added the sharpening for DLSS then they undone this with DLSS 2.5.1 and with the 3.0+ ones, we now have these presets, which has re-introduced some old ghosting issues back (probably because devs don't test the presets themselves). You can use DLSSTweaks to switch the preset or or just switch to 2.5.1 dlss version but then you won't get the other improvements we have seen with the 3. versions especially if using lower presets.

Haven't played warthunder so can't comment on it but sometimes if a games dlss implementation is noticeably bad compared to TAA, it is most likely the devs haven't done the correct mip map bias setting or/and a depth setting so does sound like a bad/wrong implementation here, sadly this is where it is an issue as switching out dlss or using dlsstweaks could be seen as a cheat so wouldn't risky any tampering here.

Amds sharpness slider is very good from when I used amd, I kept it at a pretty low %, iirc 40-50%, redux/sweetfx always does the best job but it is more faff. For nvidia, use the sharpness in the old NVCP as the geforce filters aren't as good.

 

[Nexus18]

I don't follow DF or anyone so haven't heard any noise about TAA - are people now (rightly in my opinion and use cases) saying that TAA doesn't or can sometimes not look great?

Pretty much, been a huge hate bandwagon on it last few weeks, there is a popular sub reddit for TAA , can't link due to sweary but you'll probably be able to find it from a google search. So Alex/DF are going to be doing a video looking into TAA pros/cons and all this month.

6800XT at 1440p

I prefer native res 60fps to higher fps for with fsr. I don’t like the soft smudginess in the mid to far distance that TAA has and FSR and DLSS use TAA. I even prefer FXAA to TAA (I made a thread about it)

If I have GPU power to spare I’ll run at higher than 100% resolutions.

Games that my 6800XT struggles with like starfield I use FSR to get close to 60fps.

Considering how everyone from Digital Foundry down to individual forum members go on about scaling, a surprising proportion have voted that they use native res.

Got a link to the thread? Would be a good read.

 

[Nexus18]

It’s this thread: https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/falling-out-of-love-with-anti-aliasing.18946304/

Ah that thread, yeah I posted in there a lot too about how bad TAA and other AA methods were/are

RDR 2 is probably one of, if not the worst examples of TAA. DLSS and DLDSR is also the best showcase in that game. My post looking at the different AA in that game

Falling out of love with Anti-Aliasing

I used to envy AA and have it disabled by default because I never had a graphics card powerful enough for it (going back to, like, FX5200 in the family computer days). Now games seem to be based around it and jaggies seem a thing of the past and It's great I can turn up the AA in most games...

forums.overclockers.co.uk

 

[Nexus18]

Is it normal for DLSS to cause screen tearing?

In The Last of Us, if I use DLSS I can see the slightest of screen tearing, but when disabled it completely disappears.

Nope, upscaling doesn't cause this. First thought is you're going outside your screen refresh rate with dlss so either make sure reflex is enabled or manually cap your fps to 3-5 FPS below your screen refresh rate.

 

[Nexus18]

Make sure in NVCP you have vsync set to on too (and vsync disabled in game)

 

[Nexus18]

 

[Nexus18]

Very interesting read:

https://twitter.com/NOTimothyLottes/status/1756725714198360576

2 main bits that might appeal to others more: