Gadgetory

final fantasy 15 s benchmark was the first implementation of deep learn to super sampling or DL SS but only in the benchmark version not in the actual game until just recently the last few days we haven't been fond of the benchmark as a standalone component because it is a bit flawed ever since its release but the game makes a much more sensible comparison just recently the game enabled DL SS an actual game play which will leverage the RT X device tensor cores and leverage some of that extra technology that otherwise rests dormant in common games today we're primarily looking at DL s s versus taa qualitatively comparing image fidelity with some quantitative benchmarks for performance numbers afterward because the Final Fantasy 15 benchmark is heavily controlled and flawed in other ways and NVIDIA can also sample images from a railroaded path its value is limited and so now we turn toward real gameplay for a better understanding of what's happening before that this video is brought to you by MSI's meg xiii 9d ace motherboard which primarily offers high frequency memory support for 40 500 megahertz kits and tight timings tuning but also comes equipped with a 12 phase V core vrm it ready for the 9900 K a pre-installed IO shield and an infinity mirror for RGB LEDs atop the left heatsink the RGB LED is synchronized with MSI's mystic light to support RGB and rainbow LED strips using the infinity mirror to cascade lighting learn more at the link in the description below the quick version of what DL SS does is as follows enabling DL SS and Final Fantasy 15 requires a 4k resolution which is because it will render the game effectively at 1440p then upscale it and super sample it to reduce workload on traditional shaders and migrate it to the tensor cores instead and video uses a supercomputer that works off of a series of ground truth images from the games developer all rendered at high resolutions and with 64 samples per pixel of anti-aliasing which is massive the game then is used to deep learn what the pixel values should be in each scenario running through that supercomputer the idea is brilliant to strictly at a conceptual level as Nvidia can then skip rendering some pixels on the screen to instead infer their values from neighboring pixels and base upon that deep learned data it makes a lot of sense if it can work because this reduces the overall workload and allows those shader units on the GPU to be used for something else instead the actual execution of this is still very new and it's functionally in a beta phase despite being available in a commercially selling product finally which would be Final Fantasy the LSS will generally see easiest integration into games that already supports temporal anti-aliasing or taa and is primarily marketed as a performance uplift not necessarily as an image quality uplift and on videos marketing materials there's one paragraph that suggests any kind of image quality improvement with DL SS stating the following using that basis for machine learning we've created a new rendering technique called deep learning super sampling PLSS it boosts performance by a significant degree can improve image quality that's the key one here can improve image quality and it's anti-aliasing has better temporal stability and image clarity compared to commonly used taa techniques the incorrect apostrophe at a possessive its notwithstanding Nvidia says that DLS s can improve image quality but keep in mind that there are two forms of DL SS so this is basically true just not always there's DL SS as it's implemented in Final Fantasy and then there's D LSS 2x which keeps the native render resolution and then super samples whereas the current implementation in Final Fantasy is to reduce the render resolution to 1440p from 4k and then finish the rest of the processing our opinion is that the more accurate naming would be DLS 1/2 for Final Fantasy and then DL SS for anything else it's rendering at 1440p so it's it's not exactly what you would expect regardless the primarily marketed to use for the technology is performance uplift by reducing render resolution and migrating anti-aliasing to auxilliary hardware like tensor cores to free up shaders so let's look at this from a qualitative standpoint and see what the visual differences are there are a few specific areas in Final Fantasy 15 or DL SS is most noticeable and those include flickering and shimmering of thin geometric elements at a distance one example is the fences in the background at the starting gas station with DL SS on that fence and it's thin bars flicker almost as if the pixels are being translated as we move and they even flicker when standing still which is the most noticeable pausing the game for instance on a single frame still curiously produces this flickering effect the reason for this we think there are one or two possible scenarios in one scenario DL SS may be alternating at which pixels it's skipping which becomes noticeable when the camera stops moving for a second or more in the other scenario it could be that DL SS is using a random seed generator for its solution coming up with slightly different answers to solve the pixel values each time it calculates there is no real necessarily definitive truth to what the pixel value could be so this is a possibility but we think that the former is most likely as for the reason of why this shimmering occurs to begin with aside from potentially alternating the sampling we can look toward text resolution to better understand what's happening on license plates and with other objects that have text we see that there's a slight blurring of the text legibility and quality with DL SS enabled the primary reason for this is less to do with the resolution and more to do with the available data from which the tensor cores approximate the correct values for missing pixels text has thin lines and the surrounding colors of that text like white in a license plate or maybe black or blue on a sign background are very important colors to ensuring legibility and pop of the text in the foreground in this instance some of those thin blank spaces are being misinterpreted by DL s s to be similar colors to the text and its borders thus producing a blurring effect that makes the text appeared somewhat smeared ultimately the importance of this side effect will sort of depend on the games you're playing and how you like to play them for most games at blurring tacks on something like a license plate really isn't all that important although it is an imperfection that is objectively worst quality than the taa output at the same resolution the value comes down to performance what do you gain in exchange for that and that's something we'll look at at the end we'd be curious to hear which of these two outcomes you prefer in the comments below ignoring performance how much does it matter to you that the text is a little bit blurry let us know hopefully it comes through with YouTube's compression but we're not sure how to look so you may need to see it for yourself telephone wires are another good point of comparison for these taa nearly fully erases the wires went in the far distance leaving nothing there until the player has closed in on the telephone wires close up the wires with taa still render and aren't too jagged when the camera is it laterally still but side to side or lateral movement will create a hardened align until the camera stabilizes on the horizontal axis D LSS resolves the far distance telephone wires as a flickering line with cables darting in and out of existence appearing jagged and heavily aliased the LSS appears to make the wires jagged when the players moving but smooths them out pretty well when the player is still this is contrary to other objects like the light poles and fences in the gas station parking lot you'll notice severe flickering and the light fixture when the camera is still but also that it smooths out when moving the fence flickers in a wave-like pattern when the character is in motion and with taa the fence does not flicker and the light fixture presents the same both stationary and in motion it there's there's no flickering issue with taa that's anywhere near what you're seeing with the LSS both in motion and again still this scene this next one is sort of interesting we chose it because it's complicated to render and it's a bit different from the previous ones our goal was to look at the shadows cast upon the highway guide rails thinking that the complexity of thin objects the grass mixed with light and shadows of thin objects would challenge up both taa and D LSS both came out looking at roughly the same which is good in a performance bound scenario the solution with the best performance went and that's d LSS assuming the image quality is the same and it is in this specific scenario we do have to consider the whole experience though because no one really wants to toggle D LSS on and off on a per scene basis seeing this image equality between taa and D LSS is good for the new technology although we did notice one interesting difference and that's the lights in the background if you look in the back right you'll notice the lights express more bloom with taa than with DL SS we think that the bloom would be applied after the super sampling process in the post process pipeline but it appears that the bloom gets filtered out with DL SS enabled you'll notice that the orange halo around the lights disappears with DL SS but looks more realistic and is bloom in with taa whether or not that matters to you again is going to be personal choice one final example of small geometric objects flickering includes the tent ropes where DL SS produces observable flicker for the most distant ropes in the exact same way as in our other examples before it this is because the object isn't dense enough to sample and accurately approximate the neighboring pixel values thus producing some that are the value of the background instead of the value of the rope for taa we see some slight flickering at the borders but to a lesser degree than what was seen with DL SS where you have some of the rope just straight disappearing at times for the most part the rest of the scene looks about the same which is important too perhaps more important it'll come down to whether you can overlook the flicker in favor of more performance because the rest of the scene is about identical character models are probably the most important thing to look at for this comparison we're looking at a shopkeeper with taa and with DL SS opposing one another there are several changes within the scene itself but let's first focus on the shopkeepers face facial detail with taa is higher with the face texture Cary and more blemishes centered around the cheekbones and the forehead these small blemishes exist on the texture and with DLS s they get smoothed out and sampled over it's hard to see but if you look closely and strictly at the face you will see that some of those finer details of skin color differing for example do go away with the LS s we end up removing all of that detail and smoothing out the skin and the face to a point of losing whole that extra realism in the texture as before you have to look pretty closely so whether or not this matters is up to debate and it's something that we'll have to let you think about if you care about losing this kind of detail as for the rest of the background it looks like DL s s is indirectly affecting the impact of ambient looking at the borders of objects in the shade where ambient occlusion is the most pronounced you'll see that DL SS appears with reduced shadows overall this is also true of the rivets behind the shopkeeper where the shadows around the edges diminished taa displays these shadows more prominently and it's pretty noticeable if you tab between them quickly another good quality comparison would be character hair because it wouldn't be a GN video without mentioning that this is one area where D LSS and it's smoothing effect actually helped with quality with taa the hair models are more jagged and missing some data you'll see some flickering effect as the light pierces through different parts of the hair whereas D LSS moves everything out for a better overall image this is where NVIDIA statement of DL SS sometimes being capable of higher quality proves to be true for one more test with grass and with turf FX enabled we noticed minimal impact from enabling DL SS when looking at the strands of grass overall producing roughly similar experiences between 4k taa and the LSS with distant backgrounds like this shot of a hillside a cliff and some trees we noticed that taa had more detailed cliff face ain't no with more defined faces on the geometry while D LSS meanwhile appeared to smear the output the trees atop the hill also become muddy er with the LSS when compared to taa performance benchmarks come up next the scenarios for quality are mixed some show objective quality lost with DL SS some are debatable and up to personal preferences and one shows improvement while many others are difficult to detect we have to remain reasonable here ultimately it is unlikely that you're staring as closely as possible the textures in the characters face we're using a literal magnifying glass to see differences without any upscaling concerns in such situations the qualitative comparison loses its value as remember that people are actually going to play this game not just look at it and that noticing a lot of these details is unlikely during play flickering is the most noticeable issue and the one that will most likely caused frustration and be visible during real game and that's apparent in thin objects that are prevalent in this game even the entirety of a construction crane for example was disappearing with DL SS and for much the same reasons as the powerlines work we have to turn to performance to really call whether the final detail differences like the NPC's facial differences for example are worth sacrificing for performance the performance uplift could be more noticeable than the loss of small detail for instance we just ran the 2080 TI fe for this one and we used an 88 e 6k at five point one gigahertz for the CPU to ensure the bottleneck is where it belongs it's our standardized GPU testbench you can check previous videos and articles for that we ran the highest settings with all Nvidia's game works features disabled except for turf works which we used to render the tall grass and these benchmarks we saw roughly a 21 percent performance uplift with D LSS enabled at 4k which is again really a 1440p upscaled and super sampled but if it looks the same then well what's the difference we also ran taa at 1440p and saw superior performance the D LSS and 4k but we noticed that image quality was measurably it worse in a side-by-side comparison of a license plate for example taa with 1440p resolution produced a less legible plates than 4k with TLS S which is 1440p up scaled so you get why the comparisons there and taa at 4k produced the most legible outcome but had lower performance we also measured roughly a 21 to 23 percent performance uplift and built-in benchmarks for final fantasy 15 tested with turf works disabled this time putting gameplay in the benchmark as scallion roughly equally with DLS s2 to each other so gameplay did actually mirror the benchmark in this instance which is good and videos DL SS is the most promising aspect of our TX to date although it still has some problems they are not terrible they don't ruin the technology performance is improved yes but quality does take a hit in several instances flickering is the most egregious of the offenses with the rest being sort of subjective and a wash that comes down to your own personal preferences and we can't call those shots for you to see flickery and resolve this nvidia advances DLS s because that's the most annoying out of all the changes as of now we'd probably prefer to play Final Fantasy with taa just to reduce that flicker but the rest of the DL SS execution isn't all that bad and is a bit of a saving grace for RTX in its initial implementation that's all for this one as always subscribe for more go to store documents nexus net to pick up one of our shirts our mod mats or other products and go to patreon.com/scishow mores Nexus I was out there as well thank you for watching we'll see you all next time