NVIDIA has shared a video detailing all of the improvements that it has made with the latest version of its deep learning super sampling technology, DLSS 2.3. A portion of the video is seemingly designed to convince gamers how much better DLSS is than alternatives such as AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution; NVIDIA’s Bryan Catanzaro (Vice President, Applied Deep Learning Research) points out that spatial upscalers have been around for a long time and explains why they cannot compete in terms of image quality. AMD calls its FidelityFX Super Resolution technology “a state-of-the-art spatial upscaling algorithm” on its official website.
From Catanzaro:
[…] Spatial Upscalers come with limitations. They work frame by frame, treating each frame as a separate image and then adding more pixels. They can add more pixels this way, but they can’t add more detail, and so the results are often blurry, and they often have more temporal artifacts such as flickering and crawling.
DLSS is a temporal method, to provide increased detail with less flickering. If nothing is moving, it’s easy to use information from multiple frames because you can just stack the frames together and get more detail. But of course when you’re playing a game, things are moving and the appearance is changing, lighting and shadows, it’s not so straightforward. DLSS combines AI with geometric motion vectors to make smarter decisions about what information we can reuse from prior frames.
Catanzaro goes on to share a few comparisons while noting key drawbacks of spatial upscaling methods, such as the introduction of temporal artifacts. GeForce users can check out the newest implementation of DLSS in the following games:
- Baldur’s Gate 3
- Bright Memory: Infinite
- Crysis 2 Remastered
- Crysis 3 Remastered
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Deathloop
- DOOM Eternal
- Grand Theft Auto III – Definitive Edition
- Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas – Definitive Edition
- Grand Theft Auto: Vice City – Definitive Edition
- Jurassic World Evolution 2
- Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy
- Rise of the Tomb Raider
- Shadow of the Tomb Raider
- Sword & Fairy 7
Source: NVIDIA