Making your games look better, without having to drop a bunch of money on a new graphics
card, is something that GPU manufacturers are keenly aware that gamers want, especially
now that a new GeForce or Radeon card is going to cost you a spare kidney on the secondary
market. Now, NVIDIA and AMD have both tried to use their own secret sauces to make this happen,
both NVIDIA's DLSS and AMD's FSR have made plenty of headlines recently, but Team Green
is adding another feature to its arsenal that it hopes will give it a leg up on AMD and
maybe give you a leg up in your games. They call it DLDSR, or Deep Learning Dynamic Super Resolution, and if that sounds familiar,
it's because NVIDIA's regular dynamic super resolution, you know, without the deep learning
part, has been with us since the days of the GTX970 and 980.
So let's talk about what exactly that is, and how deep learning improves upon it.
DLDSR is a super sampling technique. Basically, it uses your graphics card to render your game at a higher resolution than what
your monitor natively supports, then it scales that down to match your screen.
This produces better looking images than just rendering at your display's native resolution.
But why? Well, DSR more specifically works by taking samples of groups of neighboring pixels from
the higher resolution rendered image and blending them into a single pixel that you see on your
lower resolution display to make the resulting image more accurate.
This is essentially the same way that Super Sample Anti-Aliasing, or SSAA, works.
SSAA has been around for longer than DSR, but games had to implement it individually.
DSR has the advantage of not requiring work from game developers and also puts the image
through NVIDIA's own filter that takes into account additional surrounding pixels to further
improve image quality. DSR has a habit of making images a little softer than traditional SSAA, meaning that
some gamers like it and others don't. Regardless, it's a popular way to improve image quality, especially as it allows more
granularity with exactly how hard you want your GPU to work.
Instead of rendering the image at two times or four times your monitor's resolution,
you could specify something like 2.25 times, depending on how powerful your GPU is.
But both DSR and SSAA are very computationally expensive, since you're basically asking
your GPU to do way more work and then throw away most of it.
That is where DLDSR comes in. It leverages the tensor cores in RTX series GPUs that are designed with machine learning
and AI in mind. The idea behind DLDSR is that the neural network and the tensor cores can figure out
what the image should look like by sampling a smaller number of pixels than regular DSR
or SSAA. One example NVIDIA gave was from the game Prey, which was rendered at 1620p rather than 4K,
then downscaled to 1080p. This was accomplished with nearly no frame rate drop compared to native 1080p rendering,
and the image actually looked a little better than the traditional DSR image that downscaled
all the way from 4K. Similar to regular DSR, DLDSR doesn't need per game support, so it can actually make
your older games look refreshed. But if you're using a title that supports DLSS, you can combine the two features for
an extra quality boost without sacrificing too much performance.
Don't expect it to work miracles, though. Early reviews have said that the quality improvement over regular DSR is pretty marginal, and of
course, turning up the scaling factor is still going to slow your frame rate down.
Notice that the impact won't be as huge as it would be with traditional super sampling.
You'll need an RTX card to take advantage of DLSR, but don't feel completely left out
if you have a card from Team Red, as AMD is set to launch its own AI-based Radeon Super
Resolution technology in early 2022, which should work on any RDNA2 GPU.
AMD cards, at least for now, don't have dedicated machine learning cores like NVIDIA's
do, so it'll be interesting to see how the two super sampling methods ultimately stack
up against each other. I just hope they'll both be super.