Gadgetory

welcome back to Hard Rock's today it's time to look at another RTX technology one that's been causing a bit of a stir in the community over the last week or so that technology is invidious deep learning super sampling or D LSS which has finally made its way to both battlefield 5 and Metro Exodus as is the usual case for us we'll be going through a full visual and performance breakdown in this video and boy you're in for a fun ride with this one so we're sticking to battlefield 5 in this investigation because according to both NVIDIA and 4a games the implementation of DL SS in Metro Exodus is a bit early and still needs some polish however we haven't heard any such issues with battlefield 5 so we're going to focus on that game for now and maybe we'll check out Metro at a later date depending on our schedule you might recall that we already investigated ELSS way back in September of last year when we looked at the two demos Invidia had for the launch of their RT X GPUs the demos weren't particularly great as they were essentially canned benchmarks which we felt would give invidious DLS s new network an unrealistic advantage of optimizing the image quality compared to a dynamic game environment however we still discovered back then that DL SS performed roughly the same as reducing the image from 4k to 1800 P while providing roughly the same image quality as 1800 P so wasn't exactly off to a good start DL SS has also been available in a real world game Final Fantasy 15 for a little while now but we also didn't want to test that game because it has a terrible anti-aliasing implementation that's really not reflective of most other decent games but both battlefield 5 and Metro Xers have pretty good anti aliasing they're not just crappy blur filters which provides an excellent comparison between DL SS and a high quality native image in all DLS s games really so far DL SS is heavily locked down preventing you from simply and enabling it with any combination of settings or resolutions in the case of battlefield 5 you must have DX our reflections enabled to enable DL SS so there is no option to use do SS with ray-tracing that's already pretty disappointing because we feel most gamers should play with ray-tracing switched off in this game unfortunately you can't just use DSS to improve upon the Ori excellent performance you get without ray-tracing but it's locked down further than that on a GPU by GPU basis if you're playing at 4k all r-tx cards can access DSS however if you're a 1440p gamer the option is only available for the r-tx 2080 and below so it's not available with the RT X xx atti at 1080p only the artex 2016-2017 can use dl SS and there are similar limitations with Metro Exodus according to Nvidia the reasons for this restriction and that activating the neural network Verde LS s takes a fixed amount of time for each frame as your performance level increases DL SS begins to occupy proportionately higher percentage of the rendering time up to a point where for fast GPUs it takes longer to process deal SS than it does for the native frame so NVIDIA has made a choice to block users from activating DL SS in situations where the performance uplift is negligible or in some cases even worse than just using native rendering this definitely prevents DL SS for being that one-click performance improving feature Nvidia advertisers as many popular configurations especially those that deliver high frame rate gameplay like the RT X xx atti at 1440p can't benefit from DL SS before I jump into the image quality comparisons this time I wanted to go over the performance first as always a test of battlefield 5 with micro 990 900k test rig and for this initial batch of 4k testing I used two g-force RT X xx atti with all settings set to ultra the test run was my standard battlefield 5 test run at the beginning of the tou level so in a classic blue benchmark chart there are five data points we have the performance at native 4k then performance at 4k with ELSS enabled and then native 1440p crucially I've also added in performance with the game set to 4k but with a 78% render scale as you can see here the performance of 4k at 78% resolution which equates to a resolution of about 2995 by 1685 is roughly the same as 4k d LSS will come into play for the quality comparison later then there's also the performance with ray-tracing and D LSS disables compared to native 4k rendering which with ultra DXi reflections is only a 40 FPS experience D LSS improves performance by 37% looking at average frame rates so that's not too bad again it's the same as rendering at a 78 percent resolution scale but it's definitely a sizeable improvement however it doesn't bring the game running at 4k with DX are back up to the performance level of the game running without ultra ray tracing switching off DXi led to an 88% performance improvement yeah this is ultra DXi not low but our previous testing is showing the performance gain going from low to off to still be around 50% so from what we've seen dealer says really isn't that magic performance which this simply brings raytrace performance back up to the level of nerve rate racing at least in our test conditions but the real kicker is looking at the visual quality comparisons will start with native 4k versus pork ad LSS across all the scenes I tested there is a severe loss of detail when switching on DL SS just look at the trees in this scene the 4k presentation is exactly what you'd expect sharp clean high detail on both the foliage and trunk textures but DL SS is like a strong blur filter has been applied texture detail is completely wiped out in some cases it's like you've loaded a low texture mode while some of the fine branch detail has been blurred away or even thickened in some cases which makes the game look kind of weird in some situations of course this is to be expected DL SS was never going to provide the same image quality as native 4k while also providing a 37 percent performance uplift that would be well pretty much black magic but the quality difference comparing the two is almost laughable in how far away DL SS is from the native presentation in these stressful areas it gets worse though and we'll switch to a different scene for this one here is a comparison between D LSS and our 78 percent resolution scouts a roughly 16 85 P which we found to perform exactly the same as d LSS not just in our test run but also in a variety of other scenes it's a complete non contest the 1685 P image just Troy's the DSS image in terms of sharpness texture quality clarity basically everything just look at the quality difference between these two areas when zoomed in the 78% scaled image preserves the fine detail on the rocks to sign the sandbags the cloth for gun pretty much everywhere with DL SS everything is blurred to the point that this detail is lost and we're not talking about a situation where DL SS is noticeably better at anti-aliasing the 1685 p image is already using battlefields taa implementation which is quite good there are some instances where DL SS is smoother looking at extremely fine detail when zoomed reveals less area Singh in thin tree branches but this has come at the complete loss of detail in the foliage on the trees and well everywhere else as well and our only spot of this winds room din looking at the full image on a regular 4k PC monitor it's hard to tell the difference in aliasing because the pixel count is already very high and the non DLS s presentation with taa removes most of the key artifact students spot without anti-aliasing this leaves DL SS simply looking like Vaseline has been smeared on the display that last scene was particularly bad for DL SS but there's a common theme throughout the areas I tested and we're not even talking about DL SS versus native 4k here we're talking about DL SS versus the 1685 P image upscale to 4k both of which deliver the same performance 1685 P is a little behind native 4k in terms of sharpness as you'd expect from upscaling but D LSS is miles behind either of them in some situations I wouldn't even say DL SS is superior to a 1440p image upscale to 4k 1440 pcs are further loss of fine detail to the image and in some environments DSS can restore that detail and smooth out any jagged artifacts however the deal that says image is still very soft and blurred often with lower texture detail than 1440p it depends on the environment and it's definitely a lot closer than some of our previous comparisons but a lot of the same problems remain it gets closer again if you downscale the 4k DLS s image - native 1440p and do the comparison that resolution rather than upscaling both to 4k but even then isn't clearly better the problem I feel is that battlefield 5 s regular taa implementation is too good so perfect or anything but it's pretty good and doesn't blur out the image like taa can do in other games Final Fantasy 15 for example was quite blurry with ta enabled compare that taa image to DL SS in that game and yeah the image quality is pretty similar but battlefield 5 is sharper overall and DLS s simply can't match up in fact the native and scaled images completely obliterate the blurry mess that is Dale SS I did do some brief testing at 1440p as well this time with an RT X 2070 here DL SS performs more in line with an 84% resolution Scout so roughly 2150 by 12 10 delivering a modest 18% performance improvement over native 1440p part of this is due to 1440p performing better on the RT x 2070 then 4k does on the 20 80 TI with ultra DX r the other part is the RT x 20 70 s more limited RT and tensor called resources again we're seeing most of the same problems at 1440p as we did at 4k the DL SS image is softer and blurrier compared to upscaling at 12:10 p.m. egde to 1440p in some areas there is less area Seng but that advantage is not worth it when the overall image is so blurry DLS s is an improvement in some areas over native 1080p but again it's not an overall victory so there's really no other way to put it DL SS sucks from what we've seen testing in battlefield 5 as well as Metro X's which is supposed to be still a non perfect implementation DL SS is complete garbage and a huge waste of time a lot of people hated on ray-tracing in the implementations we've seen so far but to me DL SS is by far the worst of the two key RT x features the problems with DSS aren't even all that hard to summarize DL SS provides much worse image quality than upscaling from a resolution that provides equivalent performance for 4k gamers with the 2080 ti our upscaled 1685 p image looked far better than DL SS while providing an equivalent performance uplift over native 4k at 1440p scaling from 1210 P also looks better than D LSS this is a significantly worse outcome than our initial D LSS investigation previously in an optimal canned benchmark D LSS looked and performed like an 1800 P image so provided no benefit here D LSS looks worse than a 1685 P image at the same performance so enabling D LSS in a real-world game like Battlefield v is actually worse than using simple resolution upscaling that's been available in games for decades and that's why D LSS is complete rubbish at least with ray tracing we're getting a superior image than what we had before at admittedly a high performance cost but with D LSS we're not gaining anything in either the performance or visuals department compared to traditional techniques this is kind of what I feared when D LSS was first demonstrated while not all that impressive in kin demos either I assumed having a highly repeatable benchmark with the exact same frames in each run will present the absolute best case scenario for the AI based reconstruction DL SS uses the AI could just train itself on high resolution samples of the exact frames it will then reconstruct later but games are far more dynamic than this it's impossible at this stage to train a neural network for every single frame a game could output so when D LSS is paired with a real-world game not just a can demo it completely falls apart trying to reconstruct frames it's never seen before because this is a neural network that is constantly learning yeah dealer says could improve over time but they gap between DL SS and our equivalent up scaled images are so large that who knows how long it will take for D LSS to catch up if it's even possible right now though it's clearly a bust there are going to be some times where the comparison between D LSS on and off will be more favorable even in dynamic games tunnels that have crappy anti-aliasing implementations such as Final Fantasy 15 or more recent games like resident evil 2 if TAA already quite blurry so if you compared the already blur ETA to deal assess both would simply look blurry and DL SS would look a lot better but many modern tiles have been optimizing T to look better than ever preserving much more detail than older implementations and dealer says simply can't keep up and battlefield 5 is being pretty much a prime example here and this is without mentioning all the limitations that come with DL SS including limited resolution support depending on the GPU you have and for battlefield fight have the inability to use the LSS with that rate race on top of that Nvidia admits this is basically useless for high frame rate gaming unlike resolution upscaling which works across everything for deal it says to actually be useful several things need to happen Nvidia needs to find a way to make it less restricted then it needs to do one of two things either they need to improve the reconstruction techniques to make image quality massively better than what we're getting today or they need to find a way to make DL SS run better so the performance uplift is much larger and because I'm not talking about a minor improvement but a major improvement here it's going to be a pretty hard task as it stands today D LSS in battlefield 5 is so bad I think it actually should be removed from the game entirely gamers are potentially being robbed of either extra performance or extra visual quality through choosing to use deal SS over the less frequently talked about resolution scaling setting having the saying in the game might tempt gamers into using it when it at best provides no benefit and at worst is actually degrading the experience only when DL SS is at least equivalent to resolution scaling should the feature then be reintroduced into the game unfortunately DL SS was a feature that people were thinking would be the best of the r-tx features judging by the way in video was selling it the claims essentially amounted to a free performance uplift thanks to the power of AI and that's what a lot of gamers thought that get but the reality is pretty much so far from this though it's basically laughable and that's basically it for my thoughts on DL SS all of this stuff is also true for metro Exodus but considering that implementation is apparently still not final yet I didn't want to do a deep dive on it just yet in fact I probably won't unless updates make it noticeably better than in battlefield 5 right now my recommendation for DL SS across all games basically just don't use it play around with your resolution scaling sliders to see how the performance of visual impact will improve your experience there if you like this sort of content consider subscribing for more we also have a patreon where you can support us to get cool perks like our discord community and behind-the-scenes videos I'll catch you in the next one