Nixxes’ graphics programmer, Nico van Bentum, shared his thoughts on the recent PC drama surrounding the upscaling techniques. And, as everyone has been saying, Nico believes there’s no excuse to support only one PC upscaling tech and not all three of them.
As Nico van Bentum said:
“We have a relatively trivial wrapper around DLSS, FSR2, and XeSS. All three APIs are so similar nowadays, there’s really no excuse.”
Now in case you didn’t know, DLSS, FSR 2 and XeSS use current and previous frames (temporal data), motion vectors, and the depth buffer. So, once you’ve implemented support for one of them, you’ve already done 90% of the work for the other two.
In short, it’s relatively easy to add support for FSR 2 and XeSS once a game uses DLSS 2. Similarly, when a game uses FSR 2, it’s really easy to implement DLSS 2. And, this is precisely why we’ve seen a lot of “FSR 2 -> DLSS 2” Mods and vice versa.
For those wondering, Bethesda has not stated yet whether there are any plans for adding DLSS 2 to Starfield. From what we know so far, this highly anticipated game will support FSR 2.0 at launch. Moreover, it will be an AMD-sponsored title.
Starfield will release on September 6th!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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It’s one thing that a hardware vendor helps optimize a game.
But AMD is actively paying developers to not include DLSS. That is as sleazy as you can get. Especially considering it is trivial to add both DLSS and FSR support according to Nixxes.
It actually used to be normal to do that. Both NVIDIA and AMD did it for many years, and if NVIDIA no longer does it then it’s probably more to do with their position of market dominance that ensures they don’t have to worry about it anymore. They basically won the gaming tech race with AMD already, and now they’re focused on more important things (machine learning/AI).
Obviously but you have to consider amount of resources AMD and NV respectively have.
The only semi-recent ‘locked out’ tech that was of any consequence was GPU PhysX. GameWorks mostly functions on modern AMD hardware (RDNA1 and above) because they’re DX12.1-compliant which means they implement Conservative Rasterization and Raster Ordered Views while all GCNs did not.
Naturally, DLSS is also locked out, but in that case, FSR 2.x can be used to mostly acceptable results. Or XeSS as applicable. Considering that simple wrappers can make these technologies work, there really is no excuse to just include 1 of them.
If one of the upscaling technologies works on significantly more GPU’s, (including all of the ones the other two work on) then why bother adding the other two? The devs probably didn’t see them as necessary.
Because it’s easy if they wanted to, and it’s already proven to produce better results for supported hardware. That’s like saying “why even implement RT when most GPUs can’t use/take it”, and while that’s true in some cases, the ones that really make good use of it (like Control and Metro Exodus: EE) have it as optional features for hardware that supports it.
I’m not sure if this Nixxes dev is talking about Streamline, or if they have their own SR wrapper. Either way, the fact that a dev confirms it’s not at all difficult to implement all 3 SR techs confirms what we’ve already known from modders doing it themselves WITHOUT the use of a game’s source code.
In Cyberpunk 2077, FSR 2 was better than DLSS 2 on my RTX 3070 Ti. It might surprise you to know that FSR and DLSS have configuration available to the developers that end users are never aware of, and how good or bad these technologies ultimately look depends on how well the developers configure them (as well as how bad the graphics looked underneath the TAA blur to begin with).
Right, and yet the average skews towards DLSS even with the same inputs (i.e. if you mod FSR to DLSS, thus the parameters are same/very similar), DLSS puts out better results. I’m sure devs can tune the algo to prefer one type of artifact over the other (like how DLSS profiles work), but if 8/10 games look better with DLSS, then again, the option should be made available for those who have the hardware to utilize it, especially if the effort is not much to implement.
You write as if Nvidia has never done such (and worse) things.
Don’t be a hypocrite.
Both of them are scumbags, but Nvidia is even bigger.
Nvidia, to my knowledge, has never formed an agreement with a developer that has them include Nvidia specific tech while EXCLUDING a competitors specific tech. Mainly because AMD has never really had a compelling tech of their own to push. Nvidia has always worked with devs to get things like physx and early RT built into games but never at the expense of anyone else. That’s the difference here. AMD knows they have an inferior tech here, so when they sponsor a game they don’t want the superior option to be available as it would make them look stupid to sponsor a title but the competitor runs it better and with better IQ. Nvidia has never done anything like that. Every DLSS supported title can also work with FSR or FSR2
I agree. Earlier AMD did such thigs like including HD textures, which can not be enabled on competitor’s products due to smaller VRAM buffer. But it was fine, as you can easily disable this option if you wish. It was the same as including RT features, which were essentially exclusive to Nvidia GPUs.
The problem here is that FSR is arguably the worst upscaling tech of all three. You should either create the best upscaling technique on the market or let game devs implement all existing ones. Otherwise it looks like you are deliberately restricting players by forcing use yours tech (which is inferior to others).
Just look at resident evil. They made them nerf the raytracing too since that would give nvidia the edge. Image Resident evil 4 with real raytracing not just sh**ty console raytracing.
When Nvidia first started pushing Physx. People would buy a cheap Nvidia GPU just for Physix and then use an AMD GPU for everything else. Nvidia released a driver which disabled Physx if an AMD GPU was detected in the system. Including if you had an AMD APU.
Nvidia has a long history of being anti comopetitive. DLSS, g-sync, cuda, physx are all anti consumer vendor lock ins.
When Nvidia first started pushing Physx. People would buy a cheap Nvidia GPU just for Physix and then use an AMD GPU for everything else. Nvidia released a driver which disabled Physx if an AMD GPU was detected in the system. Including if you had an AMD APU.
Nvidia has a long history of being anti comopetitive. DLSS, g-sync, cuda, physx are all anti consumer vendor lock ins.
Nothing about building unique selling points for your product(s) makes it anti competitive. That is in fact the very nature of BEING competitive and engaging in a capitalist market. You can’t get mad at Nvidia because they developed innovations that benefitted their own products. Of course they would do that. That’s their job. It’s AMD’s job as well. Being anti competitive is when you actively try to block your competitors. And Nvidia has never done that. They’ve pushed their own innovations sure. But so has every company. They have never BLOCKED other companies work however. And that’s what AMD is doing which actually IS anti competitive. Would you say Apple’s iMessage being exclusive to iDevices is anti competitive? What about McDonald’s not sharing Mac sauce with burger king? How about Tesla not making Auto Pilot open for every other auto mfr to adopt? Of course not. Companies building unique benefits into their products to draw you from the competition is literally exactly what they’re supposed to be doing.
Let’s just make sure to thank the modding community. I think this would be a bigger deal if they somehow could block the competitions tech but they can’t. I understand it’s stupid and crap business. They both do it now so it’s not just AMD. Just in this one case the pro outweighs the cons. This is being developed with console in mind first so the better it is there the better it will be period. As we all know they have AMDs in them. So from a Bethesda standpoint it makes sense to me. The con being nothing in the long run as not scummy people will fix the issue. Make sure to tip the modder or we are just as bad right?
False there’s no money exchanging hands
This comment aged like rancid milk.
getting excited over fake laggy frames
Are you being disingenuous, or do you genuinely not know the difference? DLSS3 uses additional ‘fake’ frames. What is being talked about here is DLSS2 and FSR2 which are both anti-aliasing and upscaling solutions.
fake upscaled frames and fake in between frames. woo so exciting.
Well, you’re still off the mark. DLSS can also mean DLAA, which is antialiasing a native image. But keep howling at the moon.
He does not know the difference.
nobody uses it for antialiasing, and it’s barely advertised for that.
but keep moving the goalposts.
Hey, wrong and loud is your thing. I get it.
buddy, all the performance reviews online only look at how much more fps you can get with dlss. 2 and 3.
i don’t know what caves you hang around in, but it’s not remotely close to reality.
see ya.
“nobody uses it for antialiasing”
Everybody who uses DLSS uses it for antialiasing, Einstein. You don’t have TAA + DLSS at the same time. If you’re going to troll it’s more effective if you have half an idea what you’re talking about. see ya
Sorry, but DLSS is not used for anti-aliasing, is used for upscaling.
You’ll never see DLSS under Anti-Aliasing options, is under upscaling for a reason.
DLAA that you can say is used as Anti-Aliasing.
Just because they both rely on same AI system does not mean they the same thing, DLSS =/= DLAA
Go into Cyberpunk or TLoU1’s options menus on PC (for example) and tell me what happens to the TAA option when you select DLSS. It greys out.
Control with DLSS Quality was praised for having better image quality than native with TAA.
DLSS is absolutely an antialiasing and upscaling solution. DLAA is the same without the upscaling.
I’m not interested in speaking with people that don’t know what they talking about, especially since native resolution with TAA looks miles better than DLSS with DLAA.
DLSS has an anti aliasing pass. That’s just pure fact. Whether it looks better or not can be subjective but is also really variable depending on the game. TAA isn’t just one perfectly consistent technology, it’s all about the implementation and execution. It’s impossible to deny that some games have horrible native TAA, and that DLSS trumps those easily. It’s also hard to deny that DLSS looks better than all other upscalers, and upscaling is the norm now for a reason.
We can go back and forth as much as we want, but it absolutely can look better than native and is often at least on par, and the few cases where it looks a touch worse it’s still generally preferable to enable it in GPU limited scenarios, as the amount of performance you free up is undeniably substantial for what is in the absolute worst case a slightly less defined image. Native can be awesome obviously, but do I wanna half my framerate for a touch more stable output? DLSS is simply great bang for your buck, or frame per fidelity or whatever you wanna call it 😛
Google these phrases and read the first 10 results that come back.
“DLSS requires and applies its own anti-aliasing method. It operates on similar principles to TAA.”
and
“DLAA uses the anti-aliasing feature of DLSS without relying on the upscaling feature”.
So convinced about something you clearly don’t get.
You’re embarrassingly stupid dude.
You’re taking the piss, right?
True but in reality we use it for the performance boost.
Given the choice between DLAA and TAA, DLAA is better.
If you need the performance boost too then DLSS quality can can be better than TAA in certain implementations.
If you need to go lower than DLSS Quality then DLSS is an excellent upscaling solution and still an excellent anti-aliasing solution.
Everyone who uses DLSS is using it as a an anti-aliasing solution.
Low IQ
Dlss does upscaling and antialiasing. It’s compared to native with TAA. I think FSR does the same,at least in my limited experience.
DLSS does not do any anti-aliasing whasoever, DLAA is used for that.
you can stick with wrong belief but it won’t change the fact.
https://developer.nvidia.com/rtx/dlss
https://www.tomlooman.com/unreal-engine-dlss-performance/
“DLSS is able to combine anti-aliasing, feature enhancement, image sharpening, and display scaling, which traditional anti-aliasing solutions cannot. With this approach, DLSS can multiply performance with comparable image quality to full-resolution native rendering.”
Just stfu and take the L already f@990t
Lol say what you want. Frames are frames. How you even have the nerve to say that one is “real” or “fake” when it’s ALL just numbers being crunched and converted to an electrical signal that then gets spit out to a display is endlessly amusing. Who cares HOW the numbers are being crunched. As long as it looks good and runs well that’s all I care about. It’s called engineering bozo. Coming up with new ways to tackle old problems.
“what is ghosting?” for 500
“solve” old problems, generate new ones. nvidiots are everywhere.
Just play the game natively. idc
Makes my GPU last longer and use less power.
Don’t waste breath on neanderthals
Nixxes staff should sit silent, their ports are lazy, Spider-Man games still doesn’t have proper support for HT/SMT, after almost a year. LOL.
I see that people like to attack AMD, sure why not, but don’t forget about sponsored games by Nvidia (e.g. CP2077, Batman AK, AC3 and many more).
Also another case, for DLSS2 and DLSS3, there is a easy to use plugin for UE4 and UE5, for FSR and XeSS there is no such a plugins.
We have FSR plugins for Unreal Engine, and yes they official from AMD…
Anti-consumer
Mendacious
Deceitful
AMD needs to look good in our eyes, what the hek are they doing. This only makes us hate them.
This is not how you play the underdog card. This kind of BS makes me NOT get your video cards, or even the games you sponsor.
Yes, Nvidia did many bad things too, god knows you can’t defend them… but AMD? Oh well. I guess everyone is showing their rotten side now.
You’re using garbage a*s sharpening that has nothing to do with quality upscaling.
There’s a certain level of irony with this being said by a developer who worked on a PS5 exclusive title.
It’s a shame as for sure to get 4k even on a 4090 you’re going to want upscaling to hit nice framerates on a game of this scale and beauty. Dlss 2 is genuinely the only one I can stand looking at and I’ve tried them all.
Who cares? Just render the game natively and don’t take the latency hit. Even if you ignore latency, native resolution looks better than low res pretending to be high res anyways. People are so brainwashed into thinking they need over 9000 FPS to have a good experience now.