Assuming your render pipeline allows MSAA. I completely agree with you about the puce that is TAA but it's more flexible from a dev viewpoint (if you are using motion vectors for DLSS then TAA is already supported, MSAA only works on forward rendering, which many titles are not).
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RDNA 3 rumours Q3/4 2022
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Absolutely, there are a lot of games that just do not support the older forms of AA and I agree that TAA is more flexible. Don't get me wrong, I use DLSS/FSR at 4K and am happy at what they offer. I get that SSAA and MSAA were very brute force approach and are going the way of the Dodo.
I'm just trying to point out that the DLSS "better than native" trope only applies if we use TAA as the baseline and ignore that other forms of AA exist that give superior IQ to DLSS/FSR. Whether they are commonly used or not is irrelevant.
Even with TAA as a baseline DLSS in some games in 1440p (I suspect it's better in 4k) is just bad. Sure, thin lines look better but in MSFS it produces really bad artefacts on the water (turning it into jeans-like fabric and not water, in patches); in Deathloop railing has weird halo around it and mesh textures on windows turn into a blurry mess when moving, etc. FSR 2 in comparison might not be regenerating thin lines as well as DLSS but doesn't cause any weird halo nor super blur in Deathloop, for example. To summarise, at least in 1440 Quality DLSS is just objectively worse than TAA (including TAA upscaling) in many places. I would not call it better than native by a long shot in these affected games. That said, TAA can also be super blury and bad looking, but mostly in older games - seems with time, most devs learned how to do it properly.
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I just loaded up Watchdogs Legion at 4K and tried the various AA forms SMAA, TAA, FXAA and DLSS ultra. All with sharpening set to off. It’s a pity as I could swear it had MSAA as well.
TAA was very blurry and just an overall poor IQ. Details were destroyed at anything but close up, even at 4K it was not a good experience.
SMAA and FXAA were much better but did have some jaggies though both are far better than TAA. It was easier to live with some jaggies at 4K than just looking like I was running my 4K monitor at 1440p.
DLSS Ultra was better than TAA but still had some blurring, though it did fix the jaggy edges that both FSAA and or SMAA had. A case of much better than TAA and win some lose some against FXAA or SMAA.
TAA was very blurry and just an overall poor IQ. Details were destroyed at anything but close up, even at 4K it was not a good experience.
SMAA and FXAA were much better but did have some jaggies though both are far better than TAA. It was easier to live with some jaggies at 4K than just looking like I was running my 4K monitor at 1440p.
DLSS Ultra was better than TAA but still had some blurring, though it did fix the jaggy edges that both FSAA and or SMAA had. A case of much better than TAA and win some lose some against FXAA or SMAA.
It doesn't matter if there were/are better solutions of AA, the fact is how often are they used and how often is TAA the main one in games from past 3 years or so? And most importantly, native fundamentally looks worse when you don't have any form of AA on. Even then MSAA, SMAA, SSAA did not solve the shimmering/aliasing problem entirely, even at 4k (those issues are less visible as you go higher res. but not completely eliminated like some would have you believe). Fact is you "have" to use TAA these days unless you can overlook the issues there are without any TAA, which I don't know how any one can do.... It's why I stopped playing SE 3:
Don't even try to play RDR 2 without TAA/DLSS, MSAA at 8x even looked beyond bad, not to mention tanked performance.
Can you name games which have good AA/native IQ (as in that doesn't blur the image entirely like FXAA does, doesn't have shimmering/aliasing, doesn't have halo'ing around objects) without TAA/DLSS/FSR? Only games come to my mind:
- division 1 and 2
- tomb raider games
Days gone is the best TAA use case I've seen so far, however, it has very bad ghosting and halo'ing but the clarity and lack of shimmering/aliasing is very good.
There is far more to what makes a good "overall" image than just outright clarity/sharpness and dlss just happens to be the best when it comes to those things hence the comments of "better than native".
Also, why are you using DLSS ultra? As in ultra performance? If so, that is the worst preset of all.... I wouldn't be going below performance mode, even at 4k, if that is what you are using then it's not a wonder you find dlss blurry.
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Well it's not irrelevant if they can't be used
But really the comparison should have been to SSAA.. but then that's not native either MSAA is far from brute force - it's extremely elegant and has had a ton of development over the years.
SSAA is still with us though it's now listed under resolution scaling at either game or driver level - it's render agnostic.
Then we've got the bunch of post-process smoothers - MLAA->FXAA->single frame SMAA and 2D plus motion vectors like multiframe SMAA and TAA.
DLSS is most similar to the SS part of SSAA - it's generating extra pixels, but rather than sampling them relatively simply from either neighbouring pixels of a higher resolution it's getting them from a ML model which takes things like neighbouring pixels, motion vectors and prior training set into account. Downsample back to native resolution and you get DLSSAA - at which point it should definitely be compared with SSAA.
But I again agree it's almost always not better than native - however there are edge cases where it can be, for example where there isn't enough information in the native pixels to resolve something, but the predicted pixel out of the ML model might end up being a better choice. But that's super rare.
I played those with AA disabled at 4K. Those games are the best example as far as I recall where you can get away without using any form of AA and the image quality looked very good.
Though as you know I am back to a potato resolution for the moment so DLSS is very important
Experiment with different dlss versions in games as some can provide better results than others, reddit is a good place to find the best one, iirc, the issues you mentioned with deathloop are solved with 2.4.2 and above. FSR 2 has some bad fizzling/dis-occlusion effects, which I found more distracting, deahtloop is a great showcase for FSR 2 but not so much in other titles.
That's the thing when it comes to these AA methods and upscalers, it is very much a case of pick your poison, some are better in areas than others and everyone has different preferences, most seem to prefer sharpness over any kind of softening, even if it is increasing artifacts, which is ok, for me it just reminds me of overdone sweetfx/redux presets though, it's why I also put spiderman on hold as dlss had sharpening turned up with no way to disable it and the game looked awful with it but most people didn't notice..... Whatever gives the least shimmering/aliasing, jaggies and best temporal stability will always be my go to and this is where dlss is strongest.
Both MSFS and Deahtloop tested with newest dlss and the latter got bit better but definitely not solved. Each version of dlss has some issues, though generally newest work better on average. Still not better than native, though (sans few elements here and there). I've not been testing fsr2 much in other games yet, but in Deathloop is looks good enough to use. AA is good in both too. But neither is better than native overall (again, some elements here and there are but they both have issues in some places whereas native usually doesn't).
True about the sharpening - I like some turned on but not too much. When it cause artefacts I find it very distracting. Same with temporal stability issues.
That said, XeSS is so far, by far, the worst out of these free (only FSR1 is worse) - tons of artefacts in TR, very blurry image in Riftbreaker etc. And it barely increases FPS over native by all that, as it's just much slower than DLSS and FSR 2.
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Is this actually definitely stated somewhere by NVIDIA (even if in their docs)? All I was ever able to find as a source are urban legends. As in, that AI actually generates pixels, as last I heard from peeps that supposedly looked through the leaked source code, all the AI does is just stacking frames better but doesn't generate any pixels that weren't already there.
Yeah - I mean that's the whole basis by which it works! All upscalers are generating pixels - TAA upscaling uses neighbouring and previous frames pixels to guess at a new pixel, while DLSS uses a nueral net model which takes that same input but has been trained on reference images and uses that to guess at a new pixel. You'll see it called things like reconstruction and hallucination.
There's a slide deck here - go to about slide 31 and read onwards:
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There are a fair few recent games out there that allow more than TAA or TAA+DLSS, and not just AAA titles either. You know this is about IQ because the better than native claim is purely about the IQ and not performance right? So it is not relevant to the point of the disussion to pull the "yeah but it tanks performance". There are plenty of examples of non RT games where not using DLSS gives better IQ without tanking performance.
Apologies, I said Ultra and I meant the best quality, not performance. Even at the best quality DLSS in Watchdog Legion there were times FXAA or SMAA looked arguably a lot better. Even compared to native and AA off you could see that there was a noticeable blurring. So where a game only offers TAA or nothing, then DLSS is better than native but that is a low bar. In games where you have other AA options you can see from a few minutes testing that the "better than native" claims are just not true.
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Only game I recently played which had SMAA was FC 6 but it had bad shimmering/aliasing issues so I chose TAA with the CAS sharpening, it's why I didn't enable FSR 1 either at 3440x1440 as all the TAA artifacts were increased due to FSR 1.
I am only talking about IQ in all my points, just brought up that with the likes of MSAA, it can provide good results but the performance gets hammered such as that in rdr 2 and even then, the jaggies are still bad/noticeable (more so in motion), it just simply isn't worth it then, basically hits the FPS similar to RT would, at least with RDR 2 anyway e.g.
Not the best comparison as you have the heatwaves distorting the image somewhat but it's a good showcase of where the likes of MSAA aren't great i.e. foliage, trees. And that's using an old bad version of dlss where we didn't have the option to reduce sharpening so it looks even better now with newer versions, sadly an update to the social club launcher has prevented any changes to files now so I can't get newer/more relevant comparisons from RDR 2 now.
And again, mostly this point:
There are some (ubis titles are usually very good for options and also are some of the better show cases of different AA implementations but as said, outside of them, it's very rare) but that's why I raised the above, I'm yet to see games where there are good results to the "overall" IQ when using AA outside of TAA/DLSS, days gone is the only recent title that comes to mind but as said that is TAA based. Maybe assassins creed odyssey is another good example.
What do you qualify as "better IQ"?
I don't have watch dogs legion so can't comment but if/when I do get it, I'll check it out.
Only game I recently played which had SMAA was FC 6 but it had bad shimmering/aliasing issues so I chose TAA with the CAS sharpening, it's why I didn't enable FSR 1 either at 3440x1440 as all the TAA artifacts were increased due to FSR 1.
I am only talking about IQ in all my points, just brought up that with the likes of MSAA, it can provide good results but the performance gets hammered such as that in rdr 2 and even then, the jaggies are still bad/noticeable (more so in motion), it just simply isn't worth it then, basically hits the FPS similar to RT would, at least with RDR 2 anyway e.g.
Not the best comparison as you have the heatwaves distorting the image somewhat but it's a good showcase of where the likes of MSAA aren't great i.e. foliage, trees. And that's using an old bad version of dlss where we didn't have the option to reduce sharpening so it looks even better now with newer versions, sadly an update to the social club launcher has prevented any changes to files now so I can't get newer/more relevant comparisons from RDR 2 now.
And again, mostly this point:
There are some (ubis titles are usually very good for options and also are some of the better show cases of different AA implementations but as said, outside of them, it's very rare) but that's why I raised the above, I'm yet to see games where there are good results to the "overall" IQ when using AA outside of TAA/DLSS, days gone is the only recent title that comes to mind but as said that is TAA based. Maybe assassins creed odyssey is another good example.
What do you qualify as "better IQ"?
I don't have watch dogs legion so can't comment but if/when I do get it, I'll check it out.
You say you are focusing on IQ in all your points, yet have brought up performance multiple times. Bringing up performance and issues with other AA does not negate the fact that, "better than native" is marketing BS where they use the very low bar of TAA vs TAA+DLSS. There are plenty of games where you can test this to see what I mean and not all of them have performance or graphical issues if you use other forms of superior AA.
If I am playing a game that gives me the ability to use decent AA effectively, I almost always take it due to the very blurry detail killing smearing TAA causes.
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It's not rocket science to see why I brought it up, here I'll highlight it again for you:
It's like the people who say RT looks nice but isn't worth the performance hit, same can be applied here when talking about SSAA and MSAA.
Tell me your thoughts on those 2 images from rdr 2 of MSAA 8x VS DLSS quality, which one looks best "overall"?
You still haven't answered these questions either:
- which games do good AA and provide good IQ "overall", this doesn't mean just sharpness, it means lack of halo'ing, lack of aliasing, lack of shimmering/aliasing and lack of jaggies and good temporal stability all round. I've told you the games that I am familiar with but you haven't told me about "all these" other games.....
- what do you qualify as "good IQ"?
I might go and do some comparisons of native res. (with no TAA or good AA "if" it is present) vs dlss quality and we'll see which ones people pick as looking the best
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Yeah MSAA is at its best on 3D edges. Textures and foliage that are projections of textures on 2D planes are not great for MSAA, especially as they nearly all use partially transparent textures so there's not really an edge, just a transition from visible to transparent within the texture. Again since it's a well-developed method there are several workarounds - I always set transparent textures to SSAA in drivers which helps a lot, but really you need screen-spaced based AA to deal with them best.
Are you really asking me for the games I have tested? Even though you directly quoted me referring to WDL as a perfect example? If you play the game with RT off you get overall better IQ if you run SMAA vs TAA+DLSS Quality. SMAA at 4K reduces jaggies sufficiently that shimering is not a major issue and textures look sharp even into the distance. There is also no other artifacting introduced. DLSS will offer some improvements with aliasing and eliminates shimmering at the cost of distant detail as it adds a level of blur. It also introduces some very notiecable ghosting at high speed (for example driving), which get worse if you add sharpening to reduce the blur. So overall DLSS is not better than native with SMAA in WDL, it wins some and loses some with the perference being down to personal taste.
The only reason I use DLSS in this game is so I can enable RT.
You asked for proof, I gave it (WDL). Now you are moving goalposts to include all elimination of artifacting, shimering. haloing etc so you can claim a "win". Even DLSS doesn't do that.
Let me make it very simple so you can follow it. DLSS is ONLY better than native when you are comparing to the low bar that is TAA only.
The only reason I use DLSS in this game is so I can enable RT.
You asked for proof, I gave it (WDL). Now you are moving goalposts to include all elimination of artifacting, shimering. haloing etc so you can claim a "win". Even DLSS doesn't do that.
Let me make it very simple so you can follow it. DLSS is ONLY better than native when you are comparing to the low bar that is TAA only.
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Soldato
I remembered another game that I tested which had options for FXAA, TAA, or TAA+DLSS. Death Stranding.
TAA again adds excessive blur that really impact detail.
FXAA gives very good results, shimmering is evident but limited and textures remain sharp.
DLSS adds a level of detail back to TAA and also gives a nice performance boost but again some ghosting and oversharpening (or mesh type effect) is evident.
I would say that again it would be personal preference if you went DLSS or FXAA but I would certianly not call DLSS better than native overall.
TAA again adds excessive blur that really impact detail.
FXAA gives very good results, shimmering is evident but limited and textures remain sharp.
DLSS adds a level of detail back to TAA and also gives a nice performance boost but again some ghosting and oversharpening (or mesh type effect) is evident.
I would say that again it would be personal preference if you went DLSS or FXAA but I would certianly not call DLSS better than native overall.
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