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

Discussion in 'Videocards - NVIDIA GeForce Drivers Section' started by BlindBison, Dec 1, 2021.

  1. BlindBison

    BlindBison Ancient Guru

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    In the comments people (including the video maker) are saying NIS On with 0% sharpen decreases performance even when gaming at native resolution.

    What makes this worse is there’s no current way to enable NIS on a per game basis, you can only control sharpening on a per game basis.

    What “should” happen seems to me is if NIS is on in the NCP and Sharpen is set to 0% when at native resolution there should be no perf impact since no sharpening and no scaling is occurring.

    Alternatively they should give us a way to turn NIS on for specific games / per profile — not just control sharpening. You can do that with Nvidia Experience Overlay, but I want to do it in the control panel (it seems the overlay versions may actually have a slightly higher perf cost to boot? Unsure)

    This seems like a silly oversight unless I’m missing something. Yes, the scaling and sharpening has a slight cost we know this, but I just want to set it and forget it and have it only kick in when I’m running games at sub native resolution. Or at least let me only enable it per profile as I said above.

    One thing I wonder is, if I view profiles per game and set Sharpen to ON does this also enable NIS? If so why not just have it displayed the same as the global tab so it’s more explicit?
     
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  2. BlindBison

    BlindBison Ancient Guru

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    @ManuelG Sorry to bother you, but this may be something worth passing along to development. Either users need to be able to turn on NIS per game/per profile and not just globally OR when it is enabled globally it should not be having a performance impact when gaming at native with 0% sharpening (since no scaling and no sharpening is occurring). Thanks,
     
    Last edited: Dec 2, 2021
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  3. Mapson

    Mapson Member Guru

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    Some users are also reporting increased input lag / latency in some (not all) games.



    EDIT: incorrect media tags
     
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  4. aufkrawall2

    aufkrawall2 Ancient Guru

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    Perhaps it's extra bad with Vulkan when async compute is used in form of async present, i.e. it effectively disables it. Just an assumption though, who knows. Anyway, the way new GPU scaling and sharpen are implemented should probably be re-done from scratch. It's a bit shocking tbqh.
     
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  5. BlindBison

    BlindBison Ancient Guru

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    Interesting, huh -- yeah, for me I understand that modern spacial upscaling + modern CAS sharpen isn't free, but the cost "should" ideally be quite minimal and it definitely shouldn't be impacting performance negatively if the sharpen value is set to 0% while gaming at native resolution.

    Since I couldn't turn it on per profile and also because I was hoping to just set and forget the new/improved scaler globally (then tweak Sharpening up from 0% per profile as you can do that) what "should" happen seems to me is NIS only has a cost when upscaling and/or sharpening. If no sharpening and no scaling are taking place why is there a perf impact? It's as though it's running its operations anyway despite being at native with no sharpening requested and that seems wrong to me.
     
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  6. aufkrawall2

    aufkrawall2 Ancient Guru

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    Agreed. And I'd say that also active sharpen should be close to being for free. It's that way with Radeon Image Sharpen via driver (and I also find CAS to look much better than both the old and the new NV driver sharpen, though the 10% minimum setting of driver RIS is still a bit too strong in some cases). It really should be achievable to do driver sharpen properly...
     
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  7. Dagda

    Dagda Master Guru

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    It also sharpen the videos on native resolution with media player classic when madVR and dxva native is activated
     
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  8. BlindBison

    BlindBison Ancient Guru

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    It's interesting you make the AMD CAS Sharpen comparison because I thought it might be placebo -- I feel the same way, but I'm not sure if that perhaps comes down to my only experience with AMD CAS S being when it's built into games in an official capacity (so perhaps its tuned better?)

    For example I only have Nvidia GPU PCs, but some games like Rage 2 have the AMD CAS S in their menu and I did find it looked better to my eye than the Nvidia control panel one (though this was some time ago I tested it). It's a huge advantage that when its built in it doesn't make UI elements look horrible of course.

    I love the idea of NIS and a proper modern CAS Sharpen being available from the Nvidia control panel, but they really need to fix this reported issue I'm talking about in this thread where turning it on results in performance loss even when no scaling and no sharpening are taking place. I'm surprised they didn't offer a way to turn it on per game profile, at least would be a work around for the short term.
     
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  9. theahae

    theahae Active Member

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    They need to give us two checkboxes
    One for NIS and the other for sharpen.
     
  10. theahae

    theahae Active Member

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    Set sharpen to 0% in global options in nvcp.
     
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  11. Dagda

    Dagda Master Guru

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    thanks it worked, never thought of that obvious solution :rolleyes:
     
  12. Mineria

    Mineria Ancient Guru

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    For something that doesn't require developer implementation Nvidia should look at RIS and use that aproach instead of sticking with adaptive sharpening, since obviously they won't be able to get NIS do it as well as RIS if they keep sticking to that algorithm.
     
    Last edited: Dec 6, 2021
  13. BlindBison

    BlindBison Ancient Guru

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    Weirdly though even 0% it still appears to have a performance impact “as though” sharpening were occurring going off the linked video tests/that fellow’s comments on it. Basically whether it’s at 0, 20, or 100 (etc) it still has the same perf impact according to the tester.
     
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  14. Smough

    Smough Master Guru

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    No word or fix from nvidia yet for something that is relatively simple to fix.
     
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  15. BlindBison

    BlindBison Ancient Guru

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    Yeah, feelsbad -- I hope they at least know it's an issue
     
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  16. Undying

    Undying Ancient Guru

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    Shame mobile versions cant use nis due optimus as i have laptop with a 1060 and kinda wanted to test it, eh.
     
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  17. BlindBison

    BlindBison Ancient Guru

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    Yeah, there are some weird feature omissions when Optimus is involved. Imo every gaming laptop should have a switch to disable it seems to me. Some do, many do not.
     
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  18. xV_Slayer

    xV_Slayer Member Guru

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    Does enabling DSR have the same effect even when the resolutions aren't selected? Could someone test it?
     
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  19. yobooh

    yobooh Guest

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    It seems a way to degrade intentionally performance instead of improving them.
    I do not think that they haven't figure out the performance drop that is so obvious.

    ATM only worth scenario for NIS globally enabled it's to have a 4k/1440p monitor and a GPU not capable of gaming in any game at that resolution.
     
    Last edited: Dec 11, 2021
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  20. Reclusive781

    Reclusive781 Ancient Guru

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    NIS does not work with DSR in any way shape or form. If Nvidia does make NIS/CP sharpening work with DSR then I'm going to feel like a BETA tester.
     

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