Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware box today I'm beginning to take a deeper look into some of the new features that shipped with AMD's latest novel GPUs the Radeon rx 5700 and what we have here the rx 5700 XT of course we already have full reviews of these GPUs up on the channel if you have missed them go check them out but to save on time we didn't end up talking about any of the additional features and it was providing one of those features is Radeon image sharpening and they'll be the focus of this video we also have ready on anti lag and that'll be my next investigation both are very interesting technologies they won't marketed as must-haves or key selling points for these new GPUs but just a nice bonus for buyers and I believe anti-lag actually supports all the GPUs anyway so what is Radeon image sharpening well in very basic terms it's a post-processing feature you can enable that makes games sharper you turn it on the sharpness is improved everyone walks away happy that the image quality is now better this can have a wide range of benefits but to me there are two key use cases the first is for games that are a bit soft to begin with lots of tiles these days are using temporal anti-aliasing or taa and often that can lead to a blurry presentation radiant image sharpening is where to sharpen those games up a bit and still give a crisp image the other use cases for resolution down sampling say you have a 4k display but want a bit more performance so you can run games at 1,800 PE or 80% resolution scale or something like that this of course makes the image a bit soft as it's not being rendered at a native resolution radiant image sharpening could proce process that image add a bit of sharpness back and get close to the native image for virtually no performance loss in a sense it's basically like what Nvidia is attempting with DSS and will compare the two a bit later on radio and image sharpening isn't just a basic sharpening filter instead uses as a contrast adaptive sharpening or casas algorithm that aim be recently introduced in their fidelity FX suite while game developers can take fidelity FX and implement that in their games as they see fit Radeon image sharpening is a broad effect that doesn't require per game implementation it's a simple switch in Radeon settings to dive deeper into what cares does of quite directly from a md's material on it they say because Radeon image sharpening is based on an algorithm that modulates the degree of sharpening depending on contrast it clarifies interior object details while leaving high contrast edges largely untouched they go on to say that this prevents a number of artifacts you often get with more traditional sharpening there is a pretty big catch though while radiant image sharpening doesn't require per game implementation or any developer intervention it is only supported as of right now in DirectX 12 Vulcan and DirectX and nine games crucially this means DirectX 11 titles are not supported if you enable radiant image sharpening in those games and simply won't do anything AMD told me they decided to focus on newer api's to begin with while DirectX 9 was included because that was very easy for them only recognizes that DX 11 is the next step for support and they'll consider adding that in a future software update if there's demand from the community for that feature hopefully they do because even today there are lots of games that either only support DX 11 or perform better on DX 11 while still supporting DX 12 enabling Radeon image sharpening is straightforward all you have to do is install the latest drivers head over to the display section and enable both GPU scaling and Radeon image sharpening the feature is only available for Navi GPU so right now that's the 50 750 700 XT there is no support for Vega or older as made an image sharpening relies on some of the new hardware features in Navi to deliver cars with next to no performance loss what I will say though is right now there is no way to enable image sharpening only in specific games it's either on for everything or off you cannot set image sharpening to be enabled only in certain games in the game profile section of Radeon settings there's something aimed he should look into because gamers might not want the feature enabled in every game they play for whatever reason anyway enough waffling let's show some quality comparisons and the game I'm going to spend the most time looking at is Metro Exodus it has DSS support for NVIDIA cards it runs well in DirectX 12 mode and has a lot of high detail environments I strongly recommend watching this video at youtube's 4k quality or by grabbing a higher bitrate version from our patreon page if you are a member I'm going to start here by simply comparing the difference between image sharpening off at a native 4k resolution Metro isn't the sharpest game going around at native resolutions it's a tad bit soft and there are no anti-aliasing options in the game but there's certainly still a lot of detail in the native 4k presentation the sharpened image is noticeably sharper as you'd expect and cleans up that little bit of softness in the native image it's particularly effective on foliage really cleans up the grass and trees in this run which are the softest elements of the native image on clothes textures it has a minor effect and slightly improves what it's already a crisp texture the cows algorithm also seems to do a good job of ignoring things that you wouldn't want sharpened like motion blur or depth of field effects and while it's not perfect at ignoring those elements in motion it's hard to spot any issues with that said there are some flaws here that shouldn't be ignored overall the sharpened image is brighter in this scene if i zoom in on the thin foliage it's obviously quite a lot brighter when sharpened same goes for the train tracks and some other areas of the image it's probably not something you'd notice if it weren't for this side-by-side but it does seem to be an artifact of the filter there are also some elements that the causality doesn't know to ignore it doesn't truly know which elements should be sharpened which shouldn't for example when near the water here metro exorcist does have some screen space reflection artifacts they are more noticeable with Radeon image sharpening enabled as the artifacts are getting sharpened to be more visible a my issue but it's something I spotted overall though I think that for improving a native image radiant image sharpening does a really good job here and generally looks better than the native presentation even if it is a bit faked when you stop and examine the falls at times I felt it was perhaps too sharp maybe unrealistically sharp but during actual gameplay and motion I think this isn't as much of an issue in most circumstances don't look at some results when down sampling I'll start here with 1440p versus 4k right away the 1440p native image is a lot softer than the 4k native image and looks blurry when up scale to 4k not an ideal way to play on a high resolution display the sharpened 1440p image is a big improvement over native 1440p but ultimately just doesn't have the same level of detail as the native 4k image closed textures get pretty close but with some of the fine foliage detail and other small elements there just aren't enough pixels and native detail in the 1440p image to simulate a 4k presentation through a post process filter however the story is very different when talking about down sampling in the 1800 P range in Metro Exodus I set a zero point seven times shader scale which is roughly equivalent to 1800 P and without sharpening the 1,800 P image is obviously soft to the native 4k it's not as bad as 1440p but you're still getting a loss of clarity and fine detail compared to running at a native resolution but turn on sharpening for the 1800 P image and yeah wow I was seriously impressed with the results here it's not a perfect recreation of 4k and still suffers from some of the general issues with post process sharpening but in many scenes it's incredibly close and virtually indistinguishable from the native image true 4k has slightly more fine detail and foliage and other elements but you'd be hard-pressed to spot the difference especially without a side-by-side comparison before moving on to look at performance here let's there up some DLS s footage captured using an RT X 2070 a 4k with DL SS enabled the image is being up scaled from 1440p through invidious deep learning algorithms DL SS in Metro is the best implementation I've seen and it's much better than using radio and human sharpening on a 1440p image but it's just not as good as aimed these sharpened 1800 P in the best cases DL SS is as good to sharpen 1800 P for large elements and close textures but dealin says still suffers from the oil painting effect I mentioned in my initial investigation which looks bad in some environments and it suffers from quite a bit of fine detail loss especially for rocks and some foliage the way it thickens really fine details like tree branches or wires also degrades the DSS image in my opinion overall sharpened 1800 P gets a lot closer to native 4k than DLS s at least in Metro exodus of course we also have performance data for you across the three conditions I tested within Metro performance dropped by between one and two percent with radiant image sharpening enabled versus disabled that's a negligible difference in was at most a 1 FPS reduction which is well worth it for the quality improvements in most situations this means that for those targeting sharpened 1800 P as a higher performance replacement for 4k you're looking at around at 27% uplift average frame rates in this title for almost no quality loss those are the sort of numbers I like to see I'll also throw in DL s s numbers here obviously from a different GPU so it doesn't match up exactly to the rx 5700 XT results but in the latest version of Metro Exodus for KD LSS still performs around the same mark as the 1800 P image so this once again reinforces my opinion that a simple sharpening filter can be as good as or in this case noticeably better than jail SS for a similar performance uplift I remember saying this at the time of my DSS investigations and despite there being hope that Nvidia would train DSS to improve over time that hasn't really eventuated let's move on to battlefield 5 and again a lot of similar observations with this game sharpening a native image does look better battlefield 5 is sharper in general than Metro Exodus but still a bit soft from temporal anti-aliasing much to my surprise despite keeping film grain enabled for this testing the sharpening filter didn't really make the grain more noticeable which can often be a side effect of sharpening with grain present for resolution down sampling I focused on a 78% resolution scale which is around 1700 P because this matches the performance uplift of DL SS in this title battlefield 5 handles upscaling really well and actually looks only slightly worse at a 78% scale versus native 4k in this scene it's a bit softer a bit less details but overall it's not bad this makes it a perfect candidate for sharpening and indeed using radiant image sharpening the image is in fact sharper than native 4k despite coming from a lower resolution base so that's pretty impressive thorough DSS into the mix and it looks significantly worse than the sharpened 1700 P image battlefield 5 still has a weak TLS s implementation and really can't hold up to this super basic sharpening filter in fact even the native 1700 be image is better in my opinion so this tile shows the weakness of DL SS sharpening isn't quite as effective with this foliage dense scene from battlefield 5 but it still does a decent job of getting close enough to the native 4k image that you take the small visual quality loss for the upwards of 30% performance uplift if you're wondering about more performance numbers ready an image sharpening across all the games I tested resulted in a 1 to 2 percent performance drop so I'm not going to show you charts for every game here's a game that doesn't support DSS at all but can be used with radiant image sharpening the division - this game plays really nicely with resolution down sampling its post-processing is phenomenal and you can often run the game at a 75% resolution scale with very little loss to quality at 4k so there's no surprise the game is a good candidate for radiant image sharpening and a 75% scale with sharpening the image was often crisper than native 4k although there were some times where jagged edges were more present in the downsampled image or for distant foliage you get a few branches with the native 4k image that you don't get with a 75% scale still given sharpened 75% was often 35 percent faster than 90 4k that's a huge win in general the final example I want to look at is Resident Evil 2 this game has notoriously bad temporal anti-aliasing which leads to a very soft often blurry presentation sounds like the prime candidate for some image sharpening using random image sharpening on the native 4k presentation basically it fixes the soft image quality without introducing the jagged edges or shimmering you get with the game's SMA implementation this is another great low-cost use case for regular image sharpening that is worth considering so after all those comparisons all up I think Radeon image sharpening is genuinely quite impressive it doesn't require developer implementation you can just turn it on it sharpens the image and that can be useful in a variety of situations the big use case here is for image down sampling with high-resolution displays a sharpened 1800 peak image was typically as good as a native 4k image in my testing which means you can happily use this configuration with Navi GPS to gain around 30% more performance for a minimal quality loss down sampling all the way to 1440p didn't deliver as good results here the sweet spot is around that 70 to 80 percent resolution scale brennon image sharpening is also perfect for sharpening up games that can be left a little sought-after post-process anti-aliasing techniques like ta a given basically all games these days use this sort of anti-aliasing as opposed to more intensive techniques like MSAA or SSA a combining that with sharpening can deliver an improved image and as radiant image sharpening only reduces performance by a negligible 1 to 2 percent you can turn on without worrying about much it's also clear that Radeon image sharpening is Jiri equivalent to invidious d LSS opened by a considerable margin when we set both techniques to perform at the same frame rate brand image sharpening delivered a clearer sharper image with fewer artifacts relative to the DL SS image in a lot of my DL SS anarthas video as I said that a simple image sharpening filter would probably work a better than deal SS with a lower performance cost and it turns out that when aim D implemented that exact thing with radiant image sharpening it was actually better to be fair to in the video when comparing images from the same base resolution 1440p the DL SS upscale version was superior to AMD sharpened version but the key thing holding Nvidia back here is the performance cost of an enabling DSS if that performance cost was zero DL SS would be awesome but instead it's a significant drop and that makes it kind of worthless up against this simpler sharpening implementation to make matters worse for DSS Radeon image sharpening is vastly more compatible with today's games it works in all direct x12 volcán and DirectX 9 titles and while it is disappointing that dx11 isn't supported right now I think we'll see support for that not too far away for now though the library of supported games is much larger than the small collection for DL SS and that's down to a embiez technique not requiring develop intervention where DSS does it also works at all resolutions on all Navi cards whereas DL SS is restricted to certain resolutions GPUs and often quality levels retinal image sharpening isn't perfect though in some situations where the image is already quite sharp at a native resolution sharpening can lead to an artificial sharpened look so in those cases it's not worth using it also doesn't get everything right and in some cases you know it can sharpen things that shouldn't like artifacts and it does make the image a bit brighter but considering this is just faking it for next to no performance cost and it does improve image quality it's hard to complain about a few minor things the biggest of which probably being dx11 support at this stage to be honest right on image sharpening is really what I was hoping DSS would end up being a simple low performance cost technique that makes resolution down sampling viable deal assist didn't deliver that with its long list of limitations but radiant image sharpening is pretty close I think buyers of Navi GPUs will be really happy with this extra feature and a hope it gets the fanfare it deserves that's it for this one thanks everyone for watching all a Verizon and Navi content over the last few days it's been a major period for the channel if you're not already subscribed do so because there are more pieces of follow up content on the way consider supporting us on patreon or behind the scenes content I'll catch you in the next one