Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware hum box today it's time for our final look into Metro Exodus exploring the last remaining key technology the game includes and that's invidious deep learning super sampling or DL SS which is exclusive to their new chirring RT x graphics cards I didn't want to explore DL SS at the game's launch because the developers weren't happy with the implementation they said they were gonna patch it to improve the quality and we actually to their word that update arrived a few days after the initial release with drastically improved DL SS quality I've spoken about D LSS a few times before on the channel our first investigation was way back in September of last year and that looked at the demos Nvidia had provided for D LSS and I concluded from those demos that DL SS looked like an upscaled 1800 P image while providing roughly the same performance then just a few weeks ago I returned to look at DL SS in battlefield 5 which was a terrible implementation that looked noticeably worse than an upscaled 1685 p image making dl SS a bit of a fail in that game now we're returning to a Cadell SS in Metro Exodus and I've got to say my expectations are pretty although after seeing it in battlefield 5 hopefully the technology works better in a different game and we'll explore the quality differences in a moment like with battlefield 5 DL SS in Metro Exodus is locked down heavily depending on the GPU you have the resolution you're playing at and the quality settings and 4k you're able to use the OSS with either ray tracing on off with the RT x 2070 and above but this is the only resolution where you can use DL SS with that ray tracing and 1440p you'll need to switch ray tracing on to access the OSS although it works with all RT x GPS at this resolution then 1080p again same story with ray tracing but only the RT X 2060 and 2070 are supporting again this will disappoint people that wanted the best performance in this title with these restrictions in place you can't use dl SS to boost performance up into high frame rates for example a 20 ADT Iona can't boost their 100-plus FPS gameplay at 1440p up to 140 FPS with D LSS instead small for boosting 60 FPS gameplay or boy up into the 60 to 80 FPS range in most cases as always all the usual test system notes apply here as well I'm using micro 999 hundred K test rig with 16 gigabytes of RAM and for this set of testing just the GeForce r-tx 2080 TI with all other settings set to ultra and hair works disabled for improved 1% lower performance I've tested in two configurations 4k with ray-tracing disabled and 1440p with ray-tracing enabled starting with the performance comparisons deal SS in Metro Exodus is a little different too in battlefield 5 with battlefield 5 deal assess performance was around the same markers rendering the game at 1685 p but with metro Exodus TLS s is more at the level of 1800 P rendering in other words the performance uplift in Metro Exodus isn't as large as the performance uplift in battlefield 5 so the equivalent resolution scaling option sees the game rendering at a higher resolution while 1800 P data here is from a custom 1800 P resolution Metro Exodus also includes a shading rate option the closest to 1800 p.m. both performance and visuals is a zero point seven time shading rate from what I've experienced the 0.7 times shading mode option performs a little worse than proper 1800 P while also looking slightly worse as well all three down sampling options provide a round of 21% performance improvement over native rendering in general with a 28 DTI the game is capable of running at a little above 60 FPS without ray tracing enabled using DSS or resolution scaling bumps that up to around 80 FPS so a handy uptick however using a combination of ray tracing and DSS with this GPU doesn't bring you back up to a level of native rendering without DSS if you find the rate traced global illumination effect too subtle it's probably best to just disable it and DSS and just render the game natively obviously the quality comparison is the key here the immediately good news is DSS in Metro Exodus is nowhere near as bad as in battlefield 5 the implementation in battlefield was blurry and looked like rubbish it was far worse than even down sampling the game but with Metro Exodus at least with the latest patch DSS is much clearer relative to battlefield 5 DSS is still not as good as native 4k Metro Exodus I don't think anyone except for invidious Marketing team thought this would be the case and it's certainly not even the other demos I've seen 4k is sharper and better preserves texture detail I wouldn't say it's massively superior to DL SS like it was in battlefield but it's enough of an upgrade that remains the premium way to play metro exits although naturally you get an Associated performance here the big question is how DL SS compares to upscaling from 1800 P which as we showed performs roughly the same again with battlefield 5 this was a universal win for resolution upscaling over del SS with Metro Exodus it's not a clear-cut win for either technique in fact across most scenes I captured the two options look extremely similar both aren't quite as good as native rendering both have some watts of sharpness in detail both are somewhat softer than native 4k there are some areas where DL SS is sharper and presents a superior image most of the time it's with static elements like the watch and your character's wrist and the main menu these areas don't change much depending on where you're standing so that's where DL SS has an advantage trees are also rendered perhaps differently is the best way to put it there's less text to detail in the branches but the branches are also more pronounced and clearer I'm sure some people will prefer the way that looks and then there are some areas where DL s s is not as good up scaled 1800 P does have better fine textured detail in some areas which more closely represents the actual textures being used DL SS with its post processing techniques to improve sharpness can create a weird smeared look on some textures you might not notice that if you don't zoom in but it's an artifact that I spotted DL SS is also more prone to shimmering aliasing and other weird artifacts again depending on the scene these are issues that don't crop up in static screenshot comparisons there's only when playing the game and moving around that you can spot these issues sometimes it's distracting sometimes you won't notice unless someone points it out to you after closely examining a lot of DL SS footage I'm getting the impression that a post process sharpening and noise reduction filter is being used I don't have any insights into the development process for meta Exodus but I suspect the recent patch that fixed DL SS has simply implemented a sharpening filter to remove the blur that plagued the early version you can spot some haloing around objects which is an artifact sharpening can introduce well increased shimmery and texture smearing are also typical byproducts of post processing techniques like sharpening and noise reduction the salt assay post-processing isn't a valid technique if it improves image quality no one is going to complain and typical post-processing effects come in very little performance cost however if a filter has improved the quality of DL SS rather than further training of the deep learning system this would suggest there might only be limited scope for further improvements to image quality rather than potentially massive improvements like some people are suggesting as possible we'll just have to see how that one plays out over time one area I was interested in was to see whether a sharpening filter would also improve our upscale 1800 P image like I think it does with DSS upscaling currently does not use any post-processing like this as far as I could tell so theoretically a developer could use a sharpening filter plus upscaling as an alternative to DL s s using a very mild sharpening filter in conjunction with 1800 P rendering just help to increase apparent detail slightly and remove some of the blur associated with down sampling this is a common technique that PC gamers already used rishaad is already quite popular and it's sharpening filters are often used to combat the blur of anti-aliasing in games with poor AAA so it's not surprising to see post-process sharpening working well with 1800 PT rendering delivering at least in my opinion a universally better image than DSS with better apparent levels of detail and fewer artifacts moving onto 1440p at this resolution we are forced to enable ray tracing to use DL SS 1440p with ray tracing does perform better than 4k native rendering without ray tracing but the difference isn't significant here we are once again seeing DSS provide about a 21 percent performance uplift at 1440p however this is more in line with a 0.8 time shading rate rather than 0.7 times like with 4k gaming that's roughly equivalent to a 1290 P resolution at 1440p I feel the difference between DSS and a 0.8 time sharing rate is even more pronounced than it was at 4k but maybe not in the way you'd expect the areas where DSS is superior to down sampling becomes even more apparent at a lower resolution trees are smoother and images noticeably sharper in some areas however the issues are also accentuated shimmering and alias is more noticeable plus I began to spot weird blocky artifacts on some textures using 1440p DSS that I didn't spot at 4k the even lowest sampling rate available to do SS @ 4k klouey has some disadvantages for reconstruction and noise reduction I think DL SS looks better at 1440p overall compared to at 4k but there's still no clear winner in terms of down sampling techniques each option has its strengths and weaknesses while native rendering is still overall superior so when I began investigating TLS I wanted to answer two questions does this technology work and work as advertised and is the technology necessary with battlefield 5 the answer to both questions was undeniably no the feature blurred image quality so ultimately didn't work very well which made it unnecessarily compared to down scaling techniques with Metro Exodus it's a bit of a different story and I want to break down what I think about each of these questions we'll start with where the DL SS works in this game specifically I think it's fair to say DL SS does work it's a one-click button improves performance and the hit of visual quality is pretty minor many people won't notice some of the issues I've been mentioning and what the image quality isn't as groov native rendering I think a lot of people will be more satisfied playing their game with DL SS enabled and a higher level of performance than running with slightly better sharpness at lower performance however because it doesn't deliver equivalent or better quality than native rendering I don't think DSS works as well as Nvidia initially advertised to many of invidious initial documents compared to DSS directly to native rendering showing that DSS provided higher visual quality I'm not sure how many people bought into this but certainly that hasn't materialized it would have been black magic really to have a feature that both looked better than native rendering and ran better but now we know that isn't possible at least in the games and demos we've seen so far the restricted nature of DSS is also something that wasn't advertised and has disappointed a lot of people hoping to use the feature to enhance performance for their specific setup 1440p gaming with an RT X class GPU is quite common but at this resolution you'll need to enable ray tracing to also use TLS s considering performance with ray tracing disabled is better than RT x+ d OSS performance I think for many gamers choosing to forego RT entirely in this game will be a better choice especially if you don't really notice the improvements that ray-tracing brings arguably the more important question is where the DL SS is necessary at all even if it works if there's a better technique that achieves the same end goal then doesn't really make sense for game developers to implement to your SS and if it doesn't make sense for game devs it doesn't make sense for NVIDIA to work on the feature or use it as a selling point for their GPUs aside from marketing as you might expect from what I've seen I don't think DL SS is doing anything that another sub sampling technique can't achieve in battlefield 5 any extremely basic upscaling with superior and that's well it's not the case with Metro Exodus 1800 P in this game trades blows with 4k DL SS at the same level of performance but 1800 P with a subtle sharpening filter similar to what it appears DSS is already doing to improve image quality is universally better than DL SS across the areas I've tested in Metro so this begs the question why implement DSS at all when a developer could just use a combination of upscaling and post-processing to achieve at worst the same results or at best superior image quality it doesn't make a lot of sense for developers to choose the more restrictive DL SS option over something that works with all GPUs including invidious Pascal cuts and AMD cards and at all resolutions and quality settings it wouldn't even need to be complicated to use it could be integrated as a one-click button exactly like with DL SS and it's clear that some developers are already experimenting with techniques equivalent to dialysis even metro Exodus already includes a scaling slider as do many other games which admittedly many PC gamers don't make use of and this is without going into a discussion on even better upscaling techniques like dynamic resolution scaling which we've recently seen used in apex legends with great results or checkerboard rendering which is improved in leaps and bounds for console games and with further refinement could be the overall best option for PC games as well I'm not saying DL SS can't improve over time with faster Hardware more training and more refinement yeah it could improve but so can the multitude of other options aiming to achieve the same results dl says isn't specialist just one of the many subsampling and reconstruction techniques buying for attention this one is I guess garnered more attention than usual because Nvidia used it as a key selling point for the ITX graphics cards when in reality it's not really worth buying it true in GPU for you should buy GPUs based on their overall performance and value package not niche and ultimately unremarkable upscaling features as for Metro Exodus itself this is the best implementation of DSS I've seen and it's a feature GeForce r-tx owners will be happy with even if the developers had to resort to post-processing effects to improve image quality the results are quite respectable and more in line with what I was expecting from D LSS in real world games but if you have a Pascal GPU a Maxwell GP or something from AMD I wouldn't bother feeling like you're missing out because while it's good again it really isn't anything special that's it for my investigation into Metro Exodus DSS we probably won't be covering DL SS individually in future games unless there's something new and exciting to talk about if you know future games come out with DSS looking like what I've shown here in Metro Exodus there's really not a whole lot to add hopefully we see more implementations like Metro rather than battlefield but yeah who knows what will happen as always you can subscribe for more content consider supporting us on patreon give it a like if you liked it I'll catch you in the next one