Native rendering will always be the best choice for players who want maximum fidelity out of their games, right? Not quite, according to Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of Applied Deep Learning Research at NVIDIA, who told Digital Foundry in a new Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty AI Visuals Roundtable video published yesterday that DLSS 3.5, a new version of the technology that introduces Ray Reconstruction for improved ray tracing visuals, actually enables even better visuals than what native rendering can provide thanks to AI. Catanzaro, who can also be found in NVIDIA’s DLSS 3.5 videos, also addressed some of the controversy behind Frame Generation’s “fake frames,” claiming that they are “much realer” than traditional graphics frames.
…you know, I think DLSS 3.5 actually makes Cyberpunk even more beautiful than native rendering…that’s my belief…playing cyberpunk using DLSS is more beautiful than native, and the reason for that, again, is because you know the AI is actually able to make smarter decisions about how to render the scene than what we knew how to do without AI, and I think that’s going to continue to develop.
…I would say that Cyberpunk frames using DLSS, including Frame Generation, are much realer than traditional graphics frames. You know, if you think about all of the graphics tricks, like all the different kinds of occlusion and shadows, and fake reflections, screen space effects, and like, you know, raster in general, is just a bag of fakeness, right?
Discussion (5 replies)
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I have not yet run any game built for DLSS 3.5, but my past experience with DLSS has not looked better than native.
Different, yes, but better no.
The DLAA filter Nvidia applies to the scaled resolution is great at combating pixelation, so native tends to look a little more pixelated, but the pixelation can also come through, and way worse, on some elements of upscaled content, even with DLSS, and there is also some blur.
TBH that bicycle wheel just doesn't look like realistic shadows. They are too hard with other shadow items being diffuse.
I still haven't seen anything with DLSS that was better than native from my use. (3070TI)
Better framerate yes, but games always seem to have annoying artifacts.(Also with FSR)
Maybe there is some unicorn games where DLSS does look better than native, but nothing I have run across.
I wish more games supported DLAA by itself. I don't need the upscaling part of DLSS. What I really like is just the AA part. So far in my experience it is waaay the f*ck better than MSAA, TAA, FXAA, SMAA and all the rest. That's some really clean-@ss image quality.
Yeah. I also came to this conclusion, rather late in the game.
Going forward, if a game supports it and I have sufficient GPU power to do it, I will probably run at native res + DLAA as my AA method.