AI upscaling is all the rage the most widely used being NVIDIA's deep learning
super sampling I mean if you can keep good visuals with better performance why
wouldn't you there's just one problem with dlss every game's implementation is
different and they almost never get updated with the newest goodies later on
if only there was some way to take the
latest dlss and drop it into an older
game oh wait there is and we're going to
go over how to do it and what you can expect out of it like you can expect
dang it earn out I got mad and hurt
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the concept is simple a game comes with
a single file that determines its dlss version
funny thing about files though you can replace them Tech PowerUp has a database
of all the dlss revisions to date and programmer Brad Moore created a handy
tool called dlss swapper that makes it dead simple to try different versions on
your favorite games the question then becomes
how far can we push it we start off by installing dlss swapper
this would be straightforward but as a non-Windows store Universal app we need
to import and Trust Brad Moore's certificate before Windows will let us install it so this is one reason why uwp
apps aren't very well liked by the way but it's easy enough assuming we trust
Brad here he's outlined all the steps you need to import it so follow the
instructions and when you're done double click on the app to install it now we
need to download the dlss files from Tech PowerUp directly which
oh I'm sorry tech power up I really am for people playing along at home please
try to spread out your downloads across multiple servers if you can and I'd
suggest only getting the latest and oldest versions of each major revision
to start off with you can always come back and grab others later once they're
downloaded go ahead and click extract then optionally delete the downloaded
files once that's done the software is pretty early though so there's no
feedback when it's done extracting but if you want to be sure that they're
there you can find the files inside your documents folder with that done we can
finally do the swap well you can do this manually for any game with dlss dlss
swapper only supports Steam games right now unfortunately there's also no filter
for non-dlss games yet but you can tell when a game does support dlss by the
version number on the bottom right corner this is the dlss revision that
it's currently using and if you've never swapped the dlls before is the version
that the game shipped with dlss 1.0 the
first release rendered at a fixed 50 native resolution and it had no temporal
component either so every frame got treated in a vacuum leading to
shimmering artifacts and other errors that were often distracting and
unpleasant 1.1 improved things slightly with a sharpening filter although
there's not a whole lot more information about it and it wasn't around for long
before 2.0 came out anyway that version removed the need for each game to be
trained individually by NVIDIA and added the temporal element that makes steel SS
so impressive to look at Now 2.0's debut game was control which notably shipped
with version 1. that gave us the first side by side look at the two upscaling
revisions and highlighted how important that motion Vector data was for
improving image quality dmss 2.0 also added different scaling factors in its
quality balanced and performance presets and dlss 2.1 added the ultra performance
mode which renders at a third of the Native resolution not a lot is known
about what 2.2 does yet but early reports indicate that tweaks have been
made to reduce some of the or start effects we can see here that Doom
Eternal Metro Exodus and War Thunder are all on dlss 2.1 while F1 2021 runs 2.2
and of course shadow of the Tomb Raider runs 1.0
clicking on a game will give you a list of all the dlss versions that you've
downloaded and swapping is as simple as choosing one and clicking update as you
might expect sticking to the same major revision of dlss is probably going to be
the most stable option but if you want to be bolder you can easily reset it
back to stock as long as you don't manually delete anything just like you
could reset your water bottle to stock after getting our new spout lid but why
would you ltdstewer.com half off if you already own one or buy it with a new
bottle in testing I've found that as a general rule version 2.1 and 2.2 are
often interchangeable but some games have a floor that's usually a few
versions below what they ship with this makes sense because they'd probably have
been initially developed with that version before shipping with an updated release I did run into one game in
particular that didn't like any changes and that's War Thunder
swapping the dll disables dlss entirely
which may be a function of the anti-cheat software that Gaijin is using
if that's true then be aware that other games with anti-cheat may or may not
take kindly to tinkering with these core files either Doom Eternal which only
recently got dlss and RTX support comes stock with 2.1.66 but runs fine with the
latest revision down to as low as 2.1.55 in terms of visual Fidelity at 1080p
Ultra performance the latest dll shows significantly less shimmering on this
floor grading over stock which seems to corroborate the findings digital Foundry
made in their dlss 2.0 First Look it's not likely that you'll be using Ultra
performance at any resolution lower than 8K but this shows how far along dlss has
come since its first outings F1 2021
comes stock with version 2.2.9 which is
pretty close to the latest revision available but still upgrading has a
subtle effect on the amount of ghosting present on thin objects like the Pito
tube at the front of the car this helps reduce often acting High motion Trails
but in some scenes the car's wheels will still also ghost pretty badly and
there's unfortunately not a whole lot that the update can do for that the
reason for this is as best I can tell while the car is more or less stationary
in the frame here the motion vectors for it are moving with it at high speed
along the racetrack feeding irrelevant motion data to the algorithm this is
visible to some extent around the potato tube at high speeds as well where it
gets softer thanks to that ghosting even when you're not turning so does that
mean that upgrading to a newer version is always going to look better maybe not
in Metro Exodus we can again see ghosting thanks to that motion Vector of
the train moving along the tracks interestingly it's worse with the stock
and latest revisions of dlss while the older 2.1 revision seems to suffer less
from it not only that but want the latest version provides better Clarity
in the chain links in most cases the older version surprisingly often looks
closer to Native rendering and I struggle to explain why perhaps the
older version made less aggressive use of motion vectors than later 2.1 and 2.2
releases this doesn't really line up with digital foundry's findings with a
bright gun sight in the dark sewers so contrast and perhaps even color
detection may make up the bulk of the tweaks since 2.1 but what about dlss 1.0
well you obviously cannot use a
different major revision here the game just doesn't launch in every game we
tested however there were a few different revisions for each of the
early titles that came out like Final Fantasy XV the debut title that shipped
with revision 0.9 fascinatingly if we upgrade that to the final 1.0 variant
released for shadow of the Tomb Raider which is I think Point 17 were treated
to a slight image quality improvement it's pretty minor but the studs in
Cindy's had here have a kind of smear to them with the stock dlss while the
updated version shows them more correctly as round there's also a bit
more contrast around her shoulder pocket and a bit more clarity to her jacket's
patch you can much more clearly make out the Royal Capital lettering on the
license plate too there's a lot of admittedly subtle
differences and the Very earliest release shows even rougher upscaling so
it's just a fascinating look to see how little changes to either the algorithm
or the data set have improved things over time because remember these old
revisions they were trained by NVIDIA on a game by game basis now you might be
wondering if this easy to upgrade dlss
why did Brad have to program anything well it seems to be that NVIDIA might
want to look at opening up a little bit these off-label upgrades for dlss are
fascinating and potentially can improve your gaming experience AMD's Fidelity FX
super resolution may not be an AI upscaler but it's been Making Waves
among enthusiasts and big projects alike thanks to its open architecture not only
that but Intel's also open AI upscaler xcss hopes to compete with dlss's Walled
Garden directly whenever we finally get a taste of Team blue gpus that's a while
off yet but get subscribed because it'll be one of the biggest events in PC
gaming Hardware in a long long time and you're not going to want to miss that I
have to wonder where it all goes from here though we've got the scaling itself
we've got the temporal element with multi-frame data we've got motion
vectors to inform future frames what's
next will the scalar take data about the viewport scene geometry
I mean from there the question becomes how long before AI upscaling in effect
is doing the bulk of the rendering work with so little input from traditional
rendering that it's basically obsolete those are questions we can't answer
today we also can't answer how swapping dlss might affect your favorite game
there's just far too much to dive into for one video
so put on your scientist goggles and maybe do a little bit of testing of your
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shipping thanks for watching guys a small portion of this video's a-roll was
legit AI upscaled to 4K from 560p did
you notice if you're feeling confident take a look at our recent video on
whether we could tell if dlss was on or off it was fun