Nvidia wants you to know that AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) is a mere pretender, nothing like the Nvidia Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technique its GPUs can use to boost the framerate and/or image quality of your games. Nvidia ICAT is a powerful image comparator that anyone can use to see the results.
ICAT, short for “Image Comparison And Analysis,” is a very simple program that lets you view a stack of gameplay screenshots and even recorded videos side-by-side, automaticAlly lining up the frames, and allowing you to fluidly pan across each scene, zoom in and out, on allThese images and videos are available for you to use. simultaneously. It’s got a drag-and-drop interface that makes pixel peeping child’s play, and as known pixel peepers, you’d better believe The Verge You will use it for more purposes than just gaming graphics.
But Nvidia’s hope, again, is to show how poor AMD’s FSR is compared to DLSS — or even Nvidia’s own, separate spatial upscaling technique.
For those who need a quick overview: Spatial upscaling techniques, like AMD FSR, run each of your game’s video frames one at a time through a fixed algorithm — and they don’t require a special GPU to run. Nvidia’s DLSS, on the other hand, is a TemporalUpscalingThis technique compares multiple frames and takes into account how things are moving in a scene in a videogame. It uses a neural network that is exclusively built on the Tensor cores that you can only find in an Nvidia RTX graphics card.
But before you say “that’s great Nvidia, but I can’t actually buy your new GPUs!” you should probably know that Nvidia has its own spatial upscaler as well, dubbed Nvidia Image Scaling. It’s apparently been buried in the Nvidia Control Panel for some time now, and today Nvidia is open-sourcing it on GitHub with its own SDK and support for every brand of GPU. Developers can natively integrate it into their games if they want, just like AMD’s FSR.
And, the company’s baking Nvidia Image Scaling into its GeForce Experience app so you can turn it on for any game, and adjust an in-game sharpness slider (so you can see the difference) using Nvidia’s overlay.
Is it as good as Nvidia’s DLSS? Not even close, and Nvidia’s the first to admit it. In a briefing, with The Verge, product manager Henry Lin hammered us with example after example of how DLSS (particularly the new DLSS 2.3, which suffers from less ghosting around moving objects) not only beats the pants off of Nvidia’s own spatial upscaler, but sometimes performs better than a native image. Particularly when you’re looking at thin objects with lots of edges that tend to flicker:
Personally, I’ve sworn by native resolution all the way — but Nvidia’s ICAT made me curious enough to put it to the test. So I got my computer up. Deathloop Back 4 Blood, two games which offer both AMD FSR as well as Nvidia DLSS on a 4K monitor at their highest quality settings.
In Back 4 Blood, I felt vindicated. Every part of this image looked crisper, fuller, and higher resolution at native4K, even the roof-mounted antenna.
Even parts of the scene showed AMD FSR beating Nvidia DLSS in some areas, such as all these wooden textures.
But when I tried it, Deathloop, it was the opposite story: almost everywhere I looked, DLSS was resolving and preserving details I couldn’t even see at native resolution, and with far, far less flicker from distant aliased objects.
Despite this, I still saw moments in DeathloopDLSS also does strange things. Scroll up to the top for an example: You can see how DLSS changed the sparkle of the Strelak Verso guns and muddies texture of dirt ground in exactly the same scene as my other screenshots.
I’m not a believer in DLSS quite yet, but I’m intrigued. Nvidia’s promise is that, with enough learning, games can actually look better AndDLSS is enabled and the game runs faster than native. For now, it’s something developers have to enable on a per-game basis, and not all games have the same version to offer, but that could change down the road. Nvidia’s Lin tells me that Cyberpunk 2077 already features over-the-air DLSS updates — when you open the game, it can check with the Nvidia driver to see if there’s a new version and hot swap it at launch.
“Wherever you see DLSS not match native, that’s what we’ll be working on,” says Lin.
Source: The Verge
