When is "Downscaling" worth it? (DLDSR, etc)

Discussion in 'Videocards - NVIDIA GeForce Drivers Section' started by BlindBison, Jun 21, 2022.

  1. BlindBison

    BlindBison Ancient Guru

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    I imagine if you are CPU bound then it's worth doing, but the performance hit seems pretty dang significant.

    In the games I've tested, even DLDSR with the 1.78x option (1920p is downscaled to 1440p) doesn't seem "that much" better looking to my eye though in games with crappy Anti-Aliasing it helps with image stability/aliasing very noticeably.

    One of the things I find a bit irritating is that you cannot set the DLDSR sharpness/smoothness value per profile and different games definitely need somewhat different values in my experience -- for example DOOM 2016 with the TSSAA (TX8) option is very soft looking and thus can benefit from a lower smoothness value but other games like Overwatch which do not have temporal anti-aliasing and rather use single frame SMAA and look very sharp as a result seem to look much better with a higher sharpness value to my eye.

    Another thing that seems interesting to me with all this is the Ultra Low Latency mode -- my understanding is that mode helps more when you are GPU bound and it perhaps can result in a bit more hitching if the CPU isn't fast enough for a moment and is thus late in delivering the current command buffer to the CPU (my understanding could be wrong). Thus maybe DLDSR + ULLM is a good fit as it ensures you're super duper GPU bound?

    Anyhow, just wondering what people's experience with the tech is, I haven't really been blown away by DLDSR considering it's very steep perf cost, but the better anti-aliasing is nice. I could see this being very useful in games that have built-in 60 fps caps when the user has the overhead like Dark Souls 3 or DS Remastered or some such.
     
  2. Undying

    Undying Ancient Guru

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    Honestly i never tried but kinda wanted to try it in combination with dlss. One reason is at 3440x1440 and dlssq things are looking pretty great already and second one is lack of gpu power so i can try higher dldsr options.

    Also be careful with ultra low latency so better leave it just on not ultra. I read it somewhere it can produce some nasty stuttering if you are cpu limited.
     
    Last edited: Jun 21, 2022
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  3. Mufflore

    Mufflore Ancient Guru

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    Its for those who have enough GPU power left to have:
    Another good quality full screen AA solution.
    Slightly higher detail on a lower res screen.

    I dont care to use it because I'm more than happy with my image quality at 5120x1440 and UHD, and at those res theres not a lot of power left to play with.
    With other displays I might feel differently.
     
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  4. vf

    vf Ancient Guru

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    Which processors would fall under that category? Less than 8 - 10 cores?
     

  5. Undying

    Undying Ancient Guru

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    Depends on the alot of factors i guess, cpu used, resolution, game settings... Even the 5800x can be a bottleneck.

    If one is using ultra low latency mode make sure you are always gpu bound.
     
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  6. TimmyP

    TimmyP Guest

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    I use it in almost everything on 1080p monitor. IQ is close to native 1440p non DLDSR.
     
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  7. Trunks0

    Trunks0 Maha Guru

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    Anytime you got the spare power. Especially in those older titles that fell into that gap where they just don't have a good native AA solution.

    In Overwatch you can use it's built in RenderScale to go above 100% to get a similar effect.
     
    Last edited: Jun 23, 2022
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  8. MrBonk

    MrBonk Guest

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    When is it worth it? That's like asking when is it beneficial to eat food. The answer is always, unless you have a specific purpose not to.
    IE: You value high framerates and lowest input latency possible over image quality(Such as in an online game), or you want to game with the smallest GPU/Power load possible. The game's mouse input/UI behave strange or poorly at higher resolutions.Etc.

    There are tons of scenarios where downsampling greatly benefits games even when you have decent AA already at native res. (Read: With modern games they almost never have decent AA asking is redundant. And DLSS/FSR do not count).
    In many games with TAA, the more pixel resolution you throw at it, the better the resolve is. And that benefit increases multiple fold if you downsample with a lower resolution monitor because you are feeding TAA a better quality input image to work with and then that gets oversampled to display resolution.
    Hybrid solutions (Stacking multiple types of anti aliasing) usually produce the best peformance to image quality ratio of anything.

    I could wax on all day and provide a lot of examples and comparisons and i'd be here a long time, but get off my damn lawn already.
     
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  9. BlindBison

    BlindBison Ancient Guru

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    I wish Overwatch had a built in MSAA option that you could enable alongside its SMAA -- Red Dead Redemption 2 allows the user to stack FXAA, TAA, MSAA iirc and it's useful if you've got spare GPU power.

    Overwatch has me pushing up against the limits of my 144 Hz G-Sync monitor (since I do the V-Sync ON + G-Sync ON + FPS cap to 3 beneath refresh approach) so I may try out switching to use the in-game downscaling feature. But I'd rather use MSAA if it was available. It sorta sucks that OW doesn't even have SMAA 2TX imo beyond that.
     
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  10. tsunami231

    tsunami231 Ancient Guru

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    Well i recently start using DSR to do 1440p on monitor as stop gap to keep me from buying new monitor. pefromance is there i still get 60fps, and keep me from spend money for new monitor.

    Most game look much better now,
     

  11. BmB23

    BmB23 Active Member

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    Yeah those games that don't work with proper SSAA/SGSSAA, yet don't have temporal AA built in, and all you get is fxaa or smaa. Those games also tended to be console ports that weren't that demanding on high end PC hardware anyway. I think that was pretty much why Nvidia came up with DSR in the first place.
     
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  12. DarkPoee

    DarkPoee Guest

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    Hey, can you clarify more on this? This may be the culprit on my 5800X 3080 TI when playing Warzone... Sometimes it just falls from 130-135+ on DLDSR (2.25X) + DLSS (Quality) to 30 FPS for like 30 secs and then ramps up again... Seems GPU drops to a lower power state or something, because GPU temps drop from 75C to 50-55C while it is there

    Maybe @ManuelG could take a look at this? Only happens on Warzone so far (not that I play a lot of games though)
     
  13. aufkrawall2

    aufkrawall2 Ancient Guru

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    Try if it occurs with reduced VRAM allocation setting of the game or reduced texture detail.
     
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  14. DarkPoee

    DarkPoee Guest

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    Actually, I play with everything on the lowest possible setting (aside from DLSS - Quality)
     
  15. ibizadr

    ibizadr Member Guru

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    I use it in most solo player games. My monitor is 1080p I use dldsr in game at 1440p and with dlss quality the game for me have more quality than 1080p native.
     

  16. BlindBison

    BlindBison Ancient Guru

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    Honestly the 1.78x DLDSR option I haven’t been impressed with at all with a 1440p 27 in monitor.

    Aliasing is reduced but there’s just something kind of “off” about the way the image looks to me versus native even with different sharpen/smoothness values.

    2.25x does seem to be worthwhile but the cost is very significant of course.

    I still maintain the old 4x w/ 0% smoothness direct downscale looks by far the best, but that’s an enormous cost of cost for any modern game and thus pretty impractical.
     
    Last edited: Jul 8, 2022
  17. azalea

    azalea Guest

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    You're absolutely correct about Dark Souls 3, which has a significant effect for 2.25x DL, running on a 1440P 32". That game being older and 60fps limited, of course.
     
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  18. BlindBison

    BlindBison Ancient Guru

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    Yeah, games that have their internal framerate capped like any of the Souls games on PC are good candidates for this tech seems to me.
     
  19. oneoulker

    oneoulker Member Guru

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    Why can't I seem to find a sweetspot with DLDSR smoothness? I feel like it somehow ruins the original "art style" particular game has with its AI filter. I cannot even describe what I'm experiencing probably, I just see it. It lefts me with this "uneasy" feeling that game look improved but weird nonetheless.
     
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  20. BlindBison

    BlindBison Ancient Guru

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    I've noticed the same thing, yeah -- I don't exactly know what's going on but it's been tough to find an optimal smoothness value as you say.

    I really wish you could set the smoothness per-profile (it's pretty silly you can't imo) because different games have different anti-aliasing internally (where some softens the resulting image more than others) and some games also force a "sharpen" value of their own internally.

    In Digital Foundry's tests they found that 50% smoothness (assuming no other anti-aliasing is being applied to the image) was reasonably close to matching the original DSR with 0% smoothess set to the true 4x value) so it seems that's a decent starting point (looking at their images it looked like the 50% was just a tiny hair sharpened compared to the original resolve).

    In my own tests, since most of the time you're going to be forcing TAA or some such internally which will typically soften the image "somewhat", I've found more like 45% to be a decent sweet spot for my tastes. 40% was too oversharpened in a lot of cases to my perception but weirdly some elements its like they are too soft and aren't being sharpened at all even with lower smoothness values so I agree something "weird" is going on and the downscaled image doesn't look quite right often times. There's just something "off" about it that isn't the case with the old DSR (assuming a suitably high resolution) though DLDSR does appear to be quite good at anti-aliasing.
     

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