Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware box today we're not going to address one of the frequent comments we've seen across our videos on the ITX 20 80 and 90 X 20 80 TI so far has already no we said now reviews of those cards that the RT X 28 years particularly poor value right now as it offers you know GT X 1080 TI like performance at a higher price making it pretty useless while the RT X 20 80 TI it is the fastest card on the market but it's even worse value thanks to more than 80% price premium over the 20 80 TI for only around 30% more performance on average the question or even just blanket statement we keep seeing pop up relates to DL SS we keep seeing comments like it's worth buying the ITX 2084 DL SS or DL SS is the killer feature for these RT x cards well today we're doing an early investigation into DL SS to see whether it actually could be the reason to buy an RT X 2080 or RT X xx atti using the current DL SS demos we have available I'm gonna comment a bit more on this after the quality demonstrations but we weren't originally going to cover DL SS so soon because there are only two in video provided demos right now that allow us to use DL SS in action neither of them are actual games instead there can benchmark so it's not really the best way to explore and analyze DL SS but we are seeing a lot of talk about the text so I think it warrants an early investigation anyway so if you're not familiar with DL SS it stands for deep learning super sampling and it's a new rendering technology that only works with NVIDIA GeForce r-tx graphics cards there are two dl SS modes but we can only test one of them right now the standard ELSS mode so it's the one we'll be focusing on while the name does have super sampling in it the standard DL SS mode isn't really super sampling it's more an image reconstruction technique that renders a game at a sub native resolution then uses inferencing to upscale and improve the image and of course the AI processing element of DL SS is only possible thanks to Turing's tensor course so what DL SS aims to provide is a 4k image equivalent to a native okay presentation except with higher performance than you otherwise get through native rendering this is possible because at 4k DLS s is actually rendering the game at approximately 1440p so with two times fewer samples and then upscaling it using an AI network trained on a sixty-four times super sample anti-aliased reference image you could think of it as an advanced upscaling technology similar to checkerboard rendering or temporal rendering techniques game consoles like the ps4 pro used to render games at 4k while actually rendering them at lower resolutions theoretically DLS s fixes one of the issues with checkerboard rendering making it more suitable for PC gaming where the artifacts generator through checkerboarding are much more noticeable anyway let's get into some actual quality comparisons and we'll start with the Final Fantasy 15 benchmark I recommend watching this video at youtube's maximum 4k quality or alternatively downloading the source quality file from our patreon page if you are a picture member first up we have a direct comparison of native 4k with temporal anti-aliasing or taa up against DL SS at 4k it's an interesting comparison to make because in some situations DSS provides superior image quality to the native 4k taa presentation such as with distant trees in some motion shots however for the most part the 4k tiene image is better giving you improved fine detail and a lot of the various scenes particularly the car at the beginning of the benchmark run the grass a bit later on and the close-up food shot towards the end the differences in quality range anywhere from very hard to spot to quite noticeable on a 4k display it's into the DL SS struggles with a lot of fine high resolution texture work that the native image provides especially in more static shots however as DL SS doesn't have a temporal component this reconstruction technique finds it easy to clean up moving shots where ta a either blurs the image or introduce artifacts which is why in some aspects it is superior DLS says at least in this benchmark is pretty close to the native 4k presentation but it's definitely not the same as native 4k and those with higher resolution displays will be missing out on the extra detail you get with a true native presentation of course steel SS vs. 4k taa is the stock standard comparison Nvidia suggests so I decided to look at a few other comparisons starting with deal SS versus a 4k image with no anti-aliasing of course right away you'll spot a ton of missing artifacts on the 4k no an image which is to be expected and I wouldn't suggest people play with a a disabled is especially bad on you know the characters hair and grass but the no AAA image does produce noticeably sharper and clearer texture quality when you look at say the middle of an object where there are few jaggies or artifacts distant tree quality as well has now improved to the point where the know AAA presentation is equivalent to DLS s rather than inferior to deal SS and this begins to highlight one of the key issues with Final Fantasy 15 anti-aliasing techniques then rubbish the tha implementation in this game is terrible its most comparable to a blur filter rather than a decent AAA implementation that preserves fine detail while smoothing out edges and removing shimmering enabling ta in the game simply wipes out a lot of the fine texture detail you'd otherwise get at 4k and completely destroys scenes during motion I'm not the biggest fan of taa in most games but it is possible to get right shadow of the Tomb Raider for example is a game with decent TAA this softens edges with that significantly reducing texture quality but in this particular game ta a well it sucks to be honest because Final Fantasy 15 sta is so bad the game isn't a great comparison between the native 4k image and Els s a lot of games use far better anti-aliasing techniques either with better taa or techniques like SM AAA or a combination of both so it's all well and good to say DL SS looks pretty close to Final Fantasy 15 s native 4k t a presentation but how well will it compare to a majority of games with better anti-aliasing and better native 4k well it's hard to say for certain but I'd certainly expect the gap in image quality to widen that's not to say DSS is going to be a bust there's certainly a place for a rendering technique that provides better performance for a small reduction in image quality after all we already have quality settings for a whole range of other effects but I don't think the Final Fantasy 15 demo is great for judging that exact quality reduction most games there is one very nice thing to highlight for KD LSS is far superior to a native 1440p presentation as you might recall DL s s is upscaling from 1440p to try and imitate 4k were a native 1440p textures in fine detail are noticeably blurrier when upscaling that image to 4k ourselves whereas using DL SS for upscaling it's kind of like a magic filter that cleans up everything even applying a sharpening filter using Ray shade to try and I guess cheat a bit and clean up the blurry 1440p taa image it's still not as clean as the DL SS image though it is better than the regular non sharpened 1440p presentation in terms of performance well DL SS isn't a free anti aliasing or upscaling technique so you're not going to get 1440p class performance while getting a near 4k presentation for our benchmark runs of Final Fantasy 15 s benchmark DL SS improved performance by 34% looking at average frame rates and 27% looking at 1% lows however that is compared to a native 4k running at a native 1440p improved things again producing a 26% higher average frame rate compared to 4k d LSS and I think that's a reasonable reflection of how the visual quality stacks up DL SS is a middle ground between native 1440p and 19 for K though DL SS is closer to 4k in terms of quality so of these three options I think it it could deliver the best bounce between performance and visuals for those that are less likely to notice the quality reduction compared to native 4k DSS could be the way to go but again this is only looking from one game and we have to wait for actual playable games to see how it stacks up in a more real-world usage scenario the other demo perhaps the more interesting of the two demos we can currently test Dale SS in is epics infiltrator it's pretty similar story when comparing DSS to 4k ta yeah except in this demo the TA implementation isn't complete garbage DLS s does clean up a few of the temporal artifacts that ta introduces however the 4k taa image is sharper and clearer throughout the run and it's particularly noticeable during the slower panning sections it's not a bad effort from DLS s considering it's working with a 1440p source it does get pretty close to native 4 okay and in a lot of scenes I found it pretty hard to spot any differences however native 4k is that little bit sharper so I wouldn't call the two images completely comparable again comparing 1440p to 4k d LS s don't show d LS s to be quite a bit better in terms of its clarity and overall visual quality so DL SS is once again working some black magic to upscale the image significantly above the source of 1440p material however this is perhaps the most interesting comparison in this video the infiltrator demo allows you to mess around with the resolutions a bit more than Final Fantasy 15 so here I have a native 1800 P image upscale to 4k next to 4k Dell SS this is a serious battle in some situations I noticed fewer jagged edges with the upscaled 1800 P image and in some situations I noticed higher detail with the DAO SS imagery it's an incredibly close comparison where native 4k was that little bit sharper than dl SS 1800 P is a very good match for deal s s and here's the fun part native 1800 P rendering delivers nearly identical performance to deal s s in the infiltrator demo DL SS is about two percent faster in average frame rates and six percent faster in one percent Louis of course DL SS is a good 37 percent faster than 4k in average frame rates but the key thing here is DL SS is nearly identical visually to 1800 P while also providing near identical performance just before I jump into the conclusion I wanted to briefly touch on TLS s at 1440p which is the lowest supported resolution for DLS s he D LS s is sampling the game at 1080 P then upscaling and I think a lot of what I said about 4k d LS s versus 4k TAA holds up here as well if anything the difference in clarity is a bit more pronounced at this resolution in favor of native 1440p I believe the demo is also CPU limited here with the 20 80 TI and an overclocked 8700 K so there's not much point talking about performance so there's a few interesting takeaways here from this early look at deal SS but let's first start with the limitations we only have two demos to go on neither of which are games we can jump in and freely play instead they are fully canned on the rails benchmarks and it would be easier for nvidia to optimize their our network used with de LSS for these canned scenarios rather than for a dynamic game so what we're seeing key could be DL SS image quality that is better than in real world games it's also a pretty small sample size Final Fantasy 15 is a particularly poor comparison because its stock standard anti-aliasing taa in this case is a rubbish implementation of that technology which blurs the otherwise sharp clear imagery you normally get with native 4k and while infiltrator isn't as limited in that regard it's not an actual game Nvidia also provided these benchmarks in a way that makes it very difficult to test anything other than the resolutions and quality settings they want us to use both demos are launched using batch files with pretty much everything locked down which is why you might have only seen DL SS versus 4k ta comparisons up to this point I'd have loved to pick DL SS up against better anti-aliasing techniques but it just wasn't possible on face value you look at the 4k taa versus DSS comparisons and it's hard not to be impressed Dell SS does provide pretty similar visual quality to native 4k it's not quite as good but it's close all while giving you around 30 to 35% more performance and compared to native 1440p which the OSS uses for its AR enhanced image reconstruction this form of ups going looks like black magic but dig a little deeper and at least using the infiltrator demo DL SS is pretty similar in terms of both visual quality and performance to running the game at 1,800 P and then ups going the image to 4k again it's just one demo and not a real game but poring over the footage and performance data really tempered my expectations for what to expect when DL SS comes to real-world games after all anyone with an older GPU say a Pascal based 1080 T I could simply run games at 1,800 P and get similar performance and visual quality to DLS s on an RT X 2080 that is if real-world in-game implementations of DL SS are similar to what we saw in info trailer this is partly why I didn't want to explore DSS fully until we had more tools at our disposal we still don't know how DL SS compares to different anti-aliasing techniques or whether running at something like 1800 P with a super low cost form of ante using would deliver better result for DSS without proper integration in real world games it's simply too early to say for sure but going what I've seen so far I don't think DSS is as revolutionary or as important as Nvidia and making out so as it stands right now with zero real-world games to use with DL SS I have to say I haven't seen anything to suggest DL SS is a good reason to upgrade to an RT X graphics card or that the performance uplift from DSS justifies the crazy high prices for RTX cards and the list of games that will support DSS isn't exactly filled with all the hottest upcoming titles either there are some big games in there but there will be plenty as well that don't support DL SS we will be revisiting DL SS when we can play some actual games that integrate it don't know when that will be but hopefully soon enough otherwise that just about does it for this early investigation into DL SS subscribe for more videos like this one hit that like button if you liked the video and consider supporting us on patreon to get access to our exclusive discord chat and I'll catch you in the next one you