Turning NIS On in NCP causes performance degradation even when playing at native with 0% sharpening

I don't think anyone's tested it as far as I know, but I don't think it should -- my understanding is the whole reason why NIS has a perf impact despite no scaling taking place is because the sharpen value runs constantly (even when set to 0 for ... some reason).

I guess you're right to be concerned since NIS + 0% sharpen also "shouldn't" effect perf when no scaling is occurring/at native, but alas that's where we're at.

Thanks mate, good to know

 

OMG is your computer located at a museum ?

 

Most likely its your brain that should be located there.

 

Way to go bud, shaming other because of their hardware. We are all together in this, this toxic behavior is pathetic.

 

With EnableGR535 = 0 for me, the old sharpening options "Sharpen", "Ignore Filmgrain" and "GPU Scaling" appear, but the NIS sharpen slider in GFE still applies sharpening, and it is the same text-mangling sharpening as without the registry tweak, I assume it then also still degrades performance even at 0% since it seems to be the same sharpening algorithm. So it seems that this tweak does NOT restore the old upscaling method, but only re-enables the old sharpening on top of the new one.

 

i didnt install GFE, and just disabled NIS in NVCP, does it still impact performance or its only affect GFE users?

also can someone give me a screenshot comparison between old image sharpening and NIS (in terms of quality)?

 

The GFE slider is just a different interface to the same setting, if you set NIS to 100% to make it more visible, then disable NIS, use EnableGR535 = 0 and enable the old gpu upscaling, NIS will still visibly be at 100% even if you set the old sharpen to 0%.

 

I noticed I have input lag when using DSR on my projector. I am using 1080p to 4K. I need to delete the 4K resolution on the projector so I can use 3D with 1080p, and then I'm using DSR to downscale the resolution. it gives the same quality as a real 4K with the performance reduction, but I noticed it is also very very input laggier.

I have HD FURY VRROOM that can do downscale from the device itself, I'm sure there won't be issues with it, but I wonder why there is an issue with DSR, I am using smoothing 33%. didn't try less, could it be the issue?

 

I found something interesting. Now in recent driver versions, the performance issue disappeared since NIS is now a per-game setting. Leaving it OFF globally fixes the perf hit issue at native res.

But, I found you can use old-style sharpening for some games, and NIS for others. I prefer to play Witcher 3 with old-style sharpening, while for games where it doesn't work (like GRID 2019) I have to use NIS. What I did is disable NIS in the driver with the known registry tweak:

DisableNIS.reg

Code:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\nvlddmkm\FTS]
"EnableGR535"=dword:00000000

Reboot. Then in NVCP, enable sharpening in the Witcher 3 profile (I use 36%). Now re-enable NIS:

EnableNIS.reg

Code:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\nvlddmkm\FTS]
"EnableGR535"=dword:00000001

Reboot. Now in NVCP, I enable NIS in the GRID 2019 profile. Don't touch the Witcher 3 profile. It says "Use global profile", but in reality, if I launch Witcher 3, it will use old-style sharpening without NIS at 36%, just as configured previously. While if I launch GRID 2019, it will use NIS.

If you need to change the old-style sharpening settings for a game, you need to disable NIS in the registry again, reboot, change sharpening settings, then enable NIS in the registry again and reboot. It's cumbersome, but it works. And do not enable NIS globally. If you do, then old-style sharpen won't work anymore.

Since both work at the same time, I think it might be nice if NVidia would simply give us a control in NVCP to use one or the other, without having to do the registry edit and reboot dance each time we want to change old-style sharpening settings.

PS
The way I verified that it works is by setting old-style sharpen to maximum when testing, thus making it very obvious, and also looking at the frame rate. The extreme sharpening is clearly visible, but I know it's not NIS since the frame rate exactly matches the pre-NIS performance. Furthermore, with fullscreen optimizations enabled, NIS turns off when you bring up the Windows audio volume bar and it turns on again when the volume bar disappears. Old-style sharpen doesn't do that. It's always active.

All of this is with driver version 527.56.

 

This is great news that it can now be set per game profile huzzah! Do you happen to know if enabling DLDSR then using native in-game resolution has a similar effect? No scaling is taking place so I would hope there would be no loss in performance when playing at native resolution but I also thought that would be the case for NIS...

Very interesting stuff on the older Sharpen filter, thanks for sharing.

 

I wonder about this too as I don't know if its ever been tested. I would think so long as you're not running a game in one of those DSR resolutions that you would get the same amount of performance as you would without DSR configured. "But" I also thought that's how NIS would work -- e.g. if you're not upscaling and you're not sharpening (sharpen 0%) then there'd be no perf impact when clearly there is for ... some reason. Whole thing makes me nervous about leaving DLDSR configured globally especially now that apparently dldsr uses their internal sharpen filter or some such going off some threads I've seen (well, maybe that's not exactly what it's doing but who knows).

 

Dunno about DLDSR, since my GPU doesn't support that.

 

I'm curious about this as well. Nvidia has removed sharpen from DLSS and their official stance is telling people to use NIS for sharpening if the DLSS image is too soft.

I have completely avoided NIS ever since I saw this thread, because I figured Nvidia wouldn't fix it for a long time, lol.

 

But why would you use any kind of sharpening with DLSS anyway? In my experience, DLSS Quality usually feels a tiny bit artificially sharper than native 4k (but nothing disturbing, let alone unbearable). DLSS Balanced starts to show some loss of detail which can usually feel like it's softer BUT this should be expected because some small fine details are simply not there and a simple sharpening filter will never restore any detail which simply does not exist on the input image. Virtually any detail that might be "restorable" is already reconstructed by the DLSS processing. Any kind of "dumber" processing might only cause artificial "fake detail" along with disturbing artifacts. So, I say, be reasonable and accept that upscaled 2k is just not native 4k (and potentially reconfigure the game with higher level of DLSS [e.g. Quality] and lower shadow/etc quality settings instead to gain performance...).

 

I think the reason Quality looks sharper, like you mentioned, is because they are doing sharpening on top of the AI upscaling, lol. People already mentioned trying the DLSS 2.5.1 update on several games and it is noticeably softer even in Quality mode.

Many people argue against sharpening at all in any situation, because of the 'fake detail'. But there will always be people who love sharpening and those who hate it (just like people who love/hate TXAA). DLSS has come a long way though. Final Fantasy XV uses 1.3(?) and it def looks worse than native res. But Death Stranding looks better 2k upscaled DLSS than native 4k IMO.

Everyone sees things differently (remember 'what color is the dress?' from a few years ago?). I would totally lower shadows first a bit to gain performance... But i have a friend who is obsessed with RTGI, like that is the holy grail for him. And with each new generation of cards, he is surprised that it still requires lower res to work, lol.

 

It is much softer than DLAA, let alone no TAA. Softness of DLSS Q is not "correct", as 64xSSAA ground truth shows. So sharpen makes sense, but of course 100% freely configurable.

Really doubt that, as FSR 2 is way sharper.

 

Haha. Funny you mention that. After about 10-20 minutes of staring at it, I can deliberately flip my perception between the two commonly described states within a minute. Not even professional colorist belive me I am capable of doing that, especially while being fully sober (because they can't and they make their money from playing with colors all day...). I often bring this up when we argue about which display should be the "reference" (because they always see it one way, whereas I can [similarly to the dress], alter my perception and accept any arbitrary display as "ground truth" whereas they always see the OLED as warmer then an arbitrary LCD, etc).

Yes, RT is like that... I deliberately didn't bring it up (mentioning that you might start with disabling RT options altogether to start with...). I personally always take a look at the game with RT On but I never play with it enabled (it's just not worth it for me performance/quality wise).

 

I don’t mind a mild amount of sharpening if the image has a soft look to it (e.g. Some game’s TAA solutions can result in some image softness) — but that’s assuming the sharpening is kept within reason strength wise and also assuming that it’s a high quality modern sharpen solution like AMD CAS which seems like the best one overall right now to my eye at least. My main issue with Nvidia using their internal sharpen with DLSS is that their sharpen solution just seems a lot worse than CAS right now. Well, that and they often don’t let you adjust the strength.

Instead of removing it entirely why not simply let users toggle it off and control the strength in conjunction with DLSS while they work on an updated sharpen solution? Or better yet if CAS is open source and assuming there isn’t a legal reason why not just use that? I don’t really get what they’re doing atm.

 

I wish Nvidia would just let users pick what they want to use from the control panel without having to rely on registry tweaks and rebooting PC back and forth..

 

I agree — just label things clearly so the users know which is the legacy sharpen vs the modern one.

They also should just let us manually enable or disable Smart access memory on the game profile directly on the control panel. Just default it based on their custom list then show a warning if the user changes it to something different.

Beyond that it is nutty that half refresh rate Vsync is only available in Nvidia inspector and not the normal control panel. You only get adaptive half refresh rate which doesn’t work right with the low lag Vsync trick.

so yeah Nvidia needs to give users these options for sure I agree. Side note if AMD CAS sharpen is open source then why don’t they just use that? It seems most people prefer it over Nvidia’s sharpen solutions.