DLDSR look sort of bad to anyone else or is it my configuration?

I've done a lot of experimentation with DLDSR and DSR generally with a 27 in 1440p G-Sync panel and I've got to say, I'm ... not very impressed. In games that have exceptionally poor anti-aliasing where you also have the performance overhead for it, it can be worthwhile but there are a number of issues in my experience with DLDSR at this time:

1) Whatever DLDSR is doing can make the image look kind of "off" -- I can't put my finger on it exactly, but the image can turn out looking sort of unnatural compared to native or the "true" 4x w/ 0% smoothness DSR appraoch.

2) The Nvidia smoothness option (which seems to just act as a reversed sharpen slider?) isn't the best imo -- AMD CAS is noticeably better in my experience so I sort of just wish Nvidia would update their sharpen approach at this point. For this, I just can't seem to find a smoothness value for DLDSR that looks "right" -- I know in Digital Foundry's tests Alex settled on somewhere around 50% when he was testing with all other forms of anti-aliasing turned off (without in-game AA in the Witcher 3 50% was still a touch oversharpened vs ground truth in the image he provides but I expect this will vary game to game somewhat). Still, it seems to look kind of "off" -- I assume because Nvidia's sharpen is simply worse than AMD's at this point in time perhaps? Or it may have to do with the "deep learning" portion, I'm not sure.

3) DLDSR or DSR turns the UI to absolute garbage. Most games that build in resolution scaling render out the UI in a separate pass at native and only scale the 3D content. The UI looks really really bad when I use DLDSR or DSR and so it would be cool if games that implemented DLSS and DLAA also gave us the option natively to use DLDSR in a "built in" fashion to get around the UI issues. Using the RTSS stats overlay, I gotta say DLDSR turns it to mush and it looks horrible.

4) No option to set smoothness per profile is irritating as some games have a very soft resolve with their in-game TAA while others have an overly sharp resolve due to running an invisible sharpen post process that you can't see or control (like Crysis 3). Being able to set this per profile would be nice. They also really should change the default value from 33% as not only in my own tests, but in tests like those from DF this was found to be rather wildly oversharpened and seems to just be there by default because the old DSR guassian approach defaulted to 33%.

All this to say, I'm sort of left wondering what the point even is for this technology -- it's very expensive and seems to barely improve image quality in most games I've tested (even anti-aliasing isn't improved much depending on how you set the sharpness/smoothness slider seems to me). Is my configuration off somehow? Can Nvidia do anything to improve this (seems to me they definitely could improve their sharpen approach)? "True" 4x DSR with 0% smoothness looks pretty dang awesome, but it's simply impractical given the cost. Thanks,

 

Not here. 1440p 32inch Freesync\Gsync I always enable 4k DLDSR on my 3070 wherever I can. Also did on my last 1080p 32inch to 1440p. It might be my favorite feature from this generation.

Imo DSR looks like crap compared to DLDSR. DSR is too blurry.

 

It is simply too soft when it comes to edge contrast with 1440p@27" pixel density. We would need to apply sharpen, ideally CAS of course, after scaling, and not before. But it's not possible. So yeah, I won't even use it when there's plenty of spare GPU performance. Another sad case of unnecessarily wasted potential.

 

compared to regular DLSS or even FSR 2.1 yes it doesn't look that well, but is still WAY better than TAA and a good choice if you want to make old games that doesn't include any kind of good antialiasing look nice.

If you need sharpening you can use reshade amd fidelity CAS or reshade Filmic Anamorphic Sharpen which looks really good imho.

 

That strikes me as very weird that the DLDSR Nvidia sharpen wouldn't already be applying itself post-downscale. Bizarre

And yes, I do agree to my eye at least I've noticed when games have AMD's CAS sharpen built in it looks noticeably better than forcing Nvidia's sharpen via the control panel (even if we set aside the obvious UI getting sharpened stuff which is of course gonna happen anytime we sharpen externally).

 

TAA for me greatly depends on the particular game and its implementation -- early TAA could be pretty atrocious in my view and some games nowadays still have bad implementations of it, but other titles I'm a big fan of the TAA (especially when they provide a built in AMD CAS sharpen option alongside it). DOOM Eternal's TAA looks great to me personally for example. Thanks for the headsup on using Reshade to obtain CAS sharpen, good to know will have to try that out.

 

@BlindBison I have often wondered why all the things that use Tensor cores (supposedly) don't seem to be all that impressive. These Tensor cores are always touted as being SO impressively fast but I've just not seen it so far. DLSS? AFAIK 1.x may have run on the Tensor cores, but 2.x does not. RTX Voice stuff can be run on GTX cards. DLDSR may use the Tensor cores, it is so hard to say without any proof, but if the cores are so strong why can't DLDSR be programmed to identify HUD and UI elements and either enhance it or leave those pixels out of the downscaling algorithm?

Speaking about TAA, I *still* have nightmares about playing through Fallout 4 with it on and being horrified, but not knowing what TAA was or why it was doing such terrible things to the image. So far the Forza Horizon 5 TAA has crazy trails, but I have some hope if they implement DLSS we can play around with .dll files to find a good solution. Gears 5 and Gears Tactics look fantastic to me, even being on UE4 and using TAA. The teams making the Gears games seem to actually know how to use UE. No stutter, great graphics and good performance.

It is always kind of hit and miss with so many of the options that may show up in the "Video" or "Graphics" sections of games...

 

DLSS in its latest iteration is by far the best image reconstruction technique we have and going off Digital Foundry's content it does appear to require the hardware acceleration from Tensor to work as it does. As for how much the acceleration helps we may be able to look to Intel's XESS for more context there as it actually slows down performance compared to native rendering on certain GPUs that lack the right acceleration hardware.

The real issue with it, as is being discussed in another thread, seems to be Nvidia's own sharpen filter is quite terrible compared with AMD CAS (which can be applied with Reshade). I have read that the Tensor cores also may have some value in denoising RT, but I don't know if that's actually true -- not sure if that's ever happened in a shipping game or not.

TAA for me comes down to the title's implementation -- for example I am a huge fan of DOOM Eternal's TAA, but not Final Fantasy 15's or the original Halo Reach or Crysis 2's as they were awful. Modern TAA when implemented correctly (and ideally with a mild amount of AMD's CAS sharpen imo) can look quite good to my eye, but it really depends. I hear you for the Gears team, it's nice seeing performant/well optimized UE games on PC.

I do hear you on whether or not the GPU die space was worth it for tensor, I'm not sure. AMD's approach with FSR 2 still produces decently good results without Tensor so who knows.

 

Sorry to trouble you, but do you happen to know if setting the "Smoothness" slider to 100% in conjunction with DLDSR fully disables Nvidia's sharpen filter?

In my own tests the resulting image is softer certainly but doesn't have that "weird" look to it that DLDSR at 50% has (I noticed what seems to be bad ringing around the edges of objects at 50%).

On other forums I saw people state that with DLDSR they think the smoothness slider functions like a reverse sharpen slider (not sure if that's actually true though) so I just wondered if you happened to know or have experience there. What I plan to test is DLDSR w/ Smoothness set to 100% to minimize or remove the Nvidia sharpen filter then apply AMD CAS via Reshade and see how that turns out.

My fear based on your findings testing DLSS in the other thread is that setting smoothness to 100% won't actually disable the sharpen filter but rather just switch it to a different mode or some such. If I'm to be using AMD CAS via Reshade then best not to have two sources of sharpening acting on the final image seems to me. I do hope Reshade doesn't tank performance too much, I've not yet had much experience with it but I do much prefer CAS over Nvidia's Sharpen.

 

It is true, it is a reverse sharpening filter. And even then, there is still the weird DLDSR scaling. I think problem with DLDSR is that it also acts as some sort of "anti aliasing" (not to be confused with supersampling anti aliasing). It is some kind of "edge enhancing" anti aliasing method. I really wish it was "optional". The games I want to use DLDSR dominantly already have TAA. They do not need "edge" enhancing of any sorts. It just leads to weird and blurry looking UI outlines (specifically apparent in Forza 5, which I can't unsee). It also fiddles with the original artsyle of the said game. This does not apply true to everyone however, some people are simply happy with it. Wish I was one of them.

 

DLDSR absolutely demolishes UI elements unfortunately -- and thanks a lot, that's helpful to know

I'm starting to think part of my issue was I was using the smoothness slider around 40-60 in most of my tests and that makes the games look rather odd/can produce sharpening artifacts at times. I'll have to do some more tests, but I might just give up on the feature. It's very heavy while seemingly making image quality better and worse in a number of ways as you've described (all while costing far more).

I imagine the feature might have some more utility in older games that lack any kind of anti-aliasing beyond MSAA perhaps. Side note they really really should've changed the smoothness default to something more appropriate than 33% when DLDSR is enabled rather than DSR (in fact there probably should've been two separate sliders). 33% looks extremely oversharpened in most titles.

 

Doesnt hurt my UI elements are you sure you know what you are doing?

 

Pretty sure I've configured it the standard way -- DLDSR on at 1.78x or 2.25x (only options supported) with smoothness anywhere from 40-60 makes the UI compared back to back look very bad VS native on my system/monitor. It's a little bit less bad if I set smoothness higher to 80% or so.

Interestingly CAS via ReShade seems to handle UI elements more elegantly, but the default strength of CAS there seems quite low. In general scaling / sharpening externally will "usually" result in UI element degredation to some extent -- when scaling is hanlded in-game/in-engine they always add the UI elements (and often post processing) after scaling at native on top of the scaled image for this reason.

This UI degradation is especially noticeable on RTSS text.

 

If I recall correctly, both "legacy" sharpen and the new one don't have any effect when DLDSR is used.
It looks to me like the smoothness option of DLDSR affects some kind of "texture sharpen" parameter of that scaler, where 100% is closer to neutral.

Accordingly, even at 0%, edge contrast is still hardly higher than at 100%, if at all. I think what you describe as "UI degradation" also comes down to too little edge contrast. I think the only thing you can do is to use some mild sharpen of your monitor or TV. But too many hassles for my taste.

 

Thanks a lot, that's helpful

Thinking on it I could try using ReShade CAS on top of DLDSR. Though I found the default CAS configuration there (two tunable fields, the top most being 0 and the bottom most being 1) was incredibly subtle in its effect on the image. It was hard for me to tell that it was on at all without really look closely for when the field was checked on/off. May need to tinker with it further.

 

You can apply ReShade on top of the hi-res frame only before it gets downscaled by DLDSR, so technically that's not on top of DLDSR (and thus not ideal).

I typically use strength 1.2 for DLSS Quality in 1440p. It's harder to notice when it is applied before DLDSR (which then blurs the sharpened result again).

 

Thanks, that's very helpful to know -- wasn't sure where exactly ReShade got injected in the process

 

https://imgur.com/gallery/Jd17PJ5

This isn't the full resolution image but here's 4x DSR with 0% smoothness versus 2.25x DLDSR with 100% smoothness side by side. In this specific picture I actually think I favor the DLDSR output, but when I zoom out sometimes the DSR image version just looks more natural to my eye. Part of my problem before I now think having tested different smoothness values then compared to the 4x DSR 0% smooth version is that originally I was using smoothness values in the ballpark of 40-60% and thus oversharpening the image which looked pretty weird.

 

Does anyone know how to set 4.00x DLDSR or Custom DLDSR?
I wanna try higher than 2.25x but don't how to config it.

 

IMO, I think you should upload two separate screenshots to imgsli for comparison