DLSS is dead!

[Man]

Okay, so I'm currently in the middle of Cyberpunk 2077. Started playing about a month ago on my R9-380 + i7-2600 PC and as you can imagine; the performance was abysmal.  Even at a lowly 900p, frame rate would often dip below 37FPS* and then I'd get severe screen tearing. The image quality was soft, screen tearing would often rear its ugly head and it was a very bad experience. 

 

A few days ago I heard about FSR 2.0 mod, decided to give it a shot and just... wow, what a massive difference. Now I'm playing at FSR 2.0 set to 'balanced' and now it's pretty much a rock solid 40FPS+ experience. VRR is pretty much always engaged. Not only that but image quality looks almost on par with 1080p. 

 

As for the ghosting and car trails etc., they don't bother me too much + as per Digital Foundry, DLSS 2.0 also exhibit the same ghosting issues in Cyberpunk and I don't recall anyone crying about it so...you know, biased 'goblins' blowing the issues way out of proportions! The issues are there, I admit, but they're by no means deal breaking and you can absolutely enjoy the game. Plus, we are talking about a mod that was hastily put together by a lone modder merely as a proof of concept. Can't complain too much, right?!   

 

*My FreeSync monitor's lower sync range has been reduced to 37Hz (down from 45Hz) via CRU. The panel can't go any lower than that, unfortunately.

 

P.S Apologies for the sensationalist, click bait-ey title. Couldn't think of anything better and besides we are on LTT Forum so it's only natural to follow the footsteps of its founder?!

[Motifator]

I don't know how you're coming up with an utterly unrelated conclusion of DLSS being "dead", when I'm running it every day on Warzone...

I think what you're trying to say is, FSR 2.0 is getting better adaptation and therefore it has started to overshadow DLSS. Especially with the pricing of AMD GPUs. It's a shame COD is still DLSS only, though.

[venomtail]

This is just the start of upscaling technologies. This can only go two ways. AMD doubles down on FSR being open source, push it to being the de-facto upscaler and somehow optimize their low end cards to work even better with FSR taking a huge chuck of the ultra budget market, talking RX6400 range, max $150 per new GPU. 

 

Or AMD and NVIDIA will have an unwritten agreement to compete for a few years to develop the technologies before releasing premium versions of each respective upscaler for premium cards where stagnation starts for the sake of MORE profit

[WereCat]

9 minutes ago, Motifator said:

Especially with the pricing of AMD GPUs. It's a shame COD is still DLSS only, though.

It's shame that Warzone looks like an absolute trash without DLSS even on native resolution, even at 1440p and higher.

[Levent]

Its a shame that DLSS still performs better and looks better, especially in CP2077. Oh well, that mean its dead then.

[porina]

I'm curious where FSR 2.0 goes. In terms of integration requirements it is similar to DLSS. If a game dev doesn't support it, a modder might be able to insert it into DLSS games. Games that don't already support DLSS probably wont be moddable for FSR 2. 

 

Market dynamics will be interesting. Nvidia still dominates in the PC gaming space, with about 6x the users vs AMD according to current Steam Hardware Survey. AMD would struggle to push their solution if it were tied to their own hardware, so open is their only realistic chance of gaining traction. Lazy game devs might go FSR 2 only, although given the integration is so similar I'd hope most new games going forward offer both, and even XeSS when Intel get around to it. I haven't looked widely, but the impression I get is DLSS works better for nvidia GPUs so would still be preferred by much of the gaming space. Before anyone says not every nvidia GPU is an RTX GPU, RTX GPU share by itself was about double that of all AMD GPU share when I checked in February. It isn't quick to work it out so I haven't updated since.

 

Game devs have a choice of following upscaling options:

FSR 1 (cross vendor via game integration, any game via AMD driver)

NIS (cross vendor via game integration, any game via nvidia driver)

FSR 2 (cross vendor via game integration)

DLSS (RTX GPUs only, requires game integration)

XeSS (Intel and generic versions, requires game integration)

[Man]

8 hours ago, Motifator said:

I don't know how you're coming up with an utterly unrelated conclusion of DLSS being "dead", when I'm running it every day on Warzone...

 

"P.S Apologies for the sensationalist, click bait-ey title. Couldn't think of anything better and besides we are on LTT Forum so it's only natural to follow the footsteps of its founder?!"

 

7 hours ago, venomtail said:

...and somehow optimize their low end cards to work even better with FSR taking a huge chuck of the ultra budget market, talking RX6400 range, max $150 per new GPU. 

Apparently, FSR 2.0 relies heavily on half precision as vectors are computed on FP16. Probably one of the reason RDNA has 2:1 FP16 compared to GCN's 1:1. 

7 hours ago, Levent said:

Its a shame that DLSS still performs better and looks better, especially in CP2077. Oh well, that mean its dead then.

Cyberpunk on FSR 2.0 looks and performs about as good (or badly) as DLSS 2.0. The FSR 'hack' is exhibiting the exact same issues as DLSS 2.0 but I don't recall many people whining about it back then. 

Don't worry, FSR will evolve!

6 hours ago, porina said:

Market dynamics will be interesting. Nvidia still dominates in the PC gaming space, with about 6x the users vs AMD according to current Steam Hardware Survey.

Until you take current gen. consoles into account which almost universally run on RDNA2. FSR2 is a no brainer for cross platform game developers + it's the only viable option to realize 'true' 4K 60 experience on PS5 and XSX. Right now, the "quality mode" on these machines is basically ~1600p @ 30FPS cap, with only a handful of exceptions.

[Levent]

27 minutes ago, Man said:

Cyberpunk on FSR 2.0 looks and performs about as good (or badly) as DLSS 2.0. The FSR 'hack' is exhibiting the exact same issues as DLSS 2.0 but I don't recall many people whining about it back then. 

Don't worry, FSR will evolve!

So will DLSS, dont worry.

PS:

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/cyberpunk-2077-fsr-1-0-vs-fsr-2-0-vs-dlss-comparison/

 

[Mister Woof]

The best part is that while my AMD cards can only do FSR, my Nvidia cards can do either 

[Middcore]

46 minutes ago, Shimmy Gummi said:

The best part is that while my AMD cards can only do FSR, my Nvidia cards can do either 

Yeah AMD really fucks up by making all their stuff open source. The way to get ahead in the GPU market is to make a proprietary edge case feature and then flog the shit out of it in your marketing. Actually as many of them as possible.

[Man]

59 minutes ago, Levent said:

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/cyberpunk-2077-fsr-1-0-vs-fsr-2-0-vs-dlss-comparison/

 

I was comparing FSR2 with DLSS 2.0 not 2.4. And it says right here: 

Quote

"The way this mod works is by hooking into NVIDIA's DLSS algorithm through a customized DLL replacement. FSR 2.0 and DLSS 2.0 are very similar in their nature, so all that is needed is to translate the DLSS calls into their FSR 2.0 equivalents."

 

1 hour ago, Levent said:

So will DLSS, dont worry.

Likely by making DLSS 3.0 incompatible with FSR, heh!

 

45 minutes ago, Shimmy Gummi said:

The best part is that while my AMD cards can only do FSR, my Nvidia cards can do either 

Your vision is rather... limited, and I'm being quite generous here!

[Mister Woof]

1 minute ago, Man said:

I was comparing FSR2 with DLSS 2.0 not 2.4. And it says right here: 

 

Likely by making DLSS 3.0 incompatible with FSR, heh!

 

Your vision is rather... limited, and I'm being quite generous here!

Well, actually, it's not by definition since they can use both technologies.

[Man]

Just now, Shimmy Gummi said:

Well, actually, it's not by definition since they can use both technologies.

I meant you're ignoring console users and people with non-RTX hardware. While I don't have the statistics at hand, I'm pretty sure that accounts to at least 80% of PC hardware.

Also, while non-RTX GPUs will be eventually phased out, current gen. consoles are here to stay for a long time. Probably around a decade or so; if PS3 and PS4's lifespans are any indicator. 

[Mister Woof]

Just now, Man said:

I meant you're ignoring console users and people with non-RTX hardware. While I don't have the statistics at hand, I'm pretty sure that accounts to at least 80% of PC hardware.

Also, while non-RTX GPUs will be eventually phased out, current gen. consoles are here to stay for a long time. Probably around a decade or so; if PS3 and PS4's lifespans are any indicator. 

what? nothing of this has anything to do with my original statement.

[Man]

Just now, Shimmy Gummi said:

what? nothing of this has anything to do with my original statement.

And I never refuted your claim. I merely said you lack vision and this only strengthens my point.

[Man]

12 minutes ago, Middcore said:

Yeah AMD really fucks up by making all their stuff open source. The way to get ahead in the GPU market is to make a proprietary edge case feature and then flog the shit out of it in your marketing. Actually as many of them as possible.

You just defined Apple, mate. Apple is EVIL!

I will never forget Steve Job's "And boy have we patented it!" remark when he unveiled the original iPhone. 

Apple in a nutshell, pretty much!

[Middcore]

10 minutes ago, Man said:

You just defined Apple, mate. Apple is EVIL!

 

I didn't make a moral judgment. 

[Jimmy Buckets]

"Biased goblins blowing things out of proportion" -proceeds to drool over FSR 2.0 while disregarding DLSS. Oops.

[porina]

2 hours ago, Man said:

Until you take current gen. consoles into account which almost universally run on RDNA2. FSR2 is a no brainer for cross platform game developers + it's the only viable option to realize 'true' 4K 60 experience on PS5 and XSX.

From the user mod example before, the work required to get FSR2 working is pretty much the same as DLSS. Work to implement both in new games should be insignificantly more than just one, although there may be a little extra QA work to test both. I'd hope good game devs implement both so people can use the best available option for the hardware. And XeSS will be a 3rd option at some point.

 

31 minutes ago, Man said:

While I don't have the statistics at hand, I'm pretty sure that accounts to at least 80% of PC hardware.

Very roughly the split at the moment on Steam Hardware Survey is 15% AMD, 75% nvidia, 10% Intel and others. In February results 1/3 of nvidia was RTX GPUs. It is time consuming to manually compile that so I haven't repeated it for current. Assuming it is unchanged it would change the split to:

AMD 15%

Nvidia RTX 25%

Nvidia non-RTX 50%

Intel and others: 10%

 

In practice I'd expect RTX share to increase over time and perhaps in August I'll repeat it as it'll be 6 months from the February results.

[Man]

14 hours ago, porina said:

AMD 15%

Nvidia RTX 25%

Nvidia non-RTX 50%

Intel and others: 10%

That's still 75% GPUs, not too far off from my 80% estimate. And of course, things start to look grim for a proprietary, black box technology such as DLSS when you bring consoles into account.

Lastly, FSR 2.0 is just one slice of the pie. You also have to consider XeSS and UE5's TSR both of which are platform agnostic. 

[Jimmy Buckets]

Yeah, we've already seen the widespread use of FSR 1.0 in consoles. Like, in that one game, Call of Duty. Uh.