DSR, or Dynamic Super Resolution, is a new 'technology' from Nvidia which claims to deliver
4K picture quality on standard full-HD displays.
In other words, it tries to emulate this top resolution on a screen sporting the bottom
resolution.
Is it worth it?
I'll let you see for yourself.
Let's jump straight in to comparisons.
The real problem is that it's a matter of balancing framerate with image quality and
there are a lot of choices out there.
Here is a picture without antialiasing.
If I zoom in on this area here you'll be able to see the difference more clearly- there
are pixellated lines everywhere that create a 'staircase' effect.
Let's add 2X MSAA to this.
The result is varied.
The lines in the bottom right look much better but some areas remain untouched.
This is due to how antialiasing works.
It works by averaging out a pixel's colour from SAMPLES, which are points taken from
within the pixel.
In other words, it's a bit like making each pixel out of 2 separate colours.
Better than 1, but it can still miss some of the lines that only just clip the corner
of the pixel and so on.
Up it to 4X MSAA and you can see a massive increase in quality.
Now, almost every line has been smoothed seemingly to perfection when you consider the resolution.
HOWEVER, let's move onto 16XQ, which is the best that Nvidia can manage before resorting
to the brute-force approaches.
Toggling between this and the earlier one shows that it's once again, another step up.
How can we improve on this?
Introducing Super Sampling.
This is only 2X.
Super Sampling detects yet more information from within the pixel.
It's almost like rendering the game at a higher resolution then down-scaling again.
The result in this area is just that some of the pixels dance about.
Look at them dancing!
However, it also smooths the edges of see-through textures.
Let's look down here to see.
Oh.
Okay, it's not as good as I was hoping.
Introducing 4X supersampling!
Now you can see a large improvement over 16XQ.
Even up by the crane you can see the difference, though if I'm honest, I wouldn't know which
one was better.
Some areas simply look thinner, a trend which continues with 8X supersampling!
This was the old champion.
It has single-handedly more than HALVED the frame-rate compared with no antialiasing.
But what if we want yet more quality and even fewer FPS?
Introducing DSR.
Wow.
This isn't a fair comparison, since the Source engine glitches out a bit at 4K and makes
things look darker and a different colour.
Also notice how the metal areas look thicker again.
Antialiasing just can't make its mind up, can it.
And I'm sorry to say this, but this doesn't necessarily reflect how it looks in-game.
The down-side, or should I say, advantage of DSR is that when you printscreen, it saves
the 4K image file!
This is merely a 4K image that I've reduced to HD resolutions.
THIS is the original.
Notice something?
It doesn't have antialiasing.
The magic happens when you compress it down to half the resolution.
This is the ultimate form of antialiasing- it's rendering it at double the resolution
and then crushing it down again.
Supersampling does roughly the same thing and before I did this comparison I expected
the results to be similar.
I'm not going to knock Super Sampling.
I don't even feel I'm worthy enough to use that.
In fact, I'd rather have a much lower antialiasing setting and up the other graphical options
instead, but that's just me.
Okay, so DSR looks pretty good.
What are its down-sides?
Firstly, the frame-rate.
At 109 FPS it's almost a quarter of what it is without antialiasing.
It's difficult to capture screenshots of it as well- FRAPS crashes the game, printing
the screen grabs the desktop and Steam's screenshot tool suffers from compression and its uncompressed
option isn't working for me either.
Perhaps it's just me.
But also, it's 4K.
On an HD screen.
Think about that.
It's HD, not 4K!
Your monitor doesn't magically get MORE pixels.
Nvidia has marketed it nicely but it simply isn't true.
Also, the menus of the games that I've tried have suffered from tiny HUDs.
They're virtually unreadable.
This is a major down-side to using DSR over traditional antialiasing such as super-sampling.
The plus-side of this is that it will hopefully encourage developers to make scaleable graphics
engines so that when true 4K screens become common-place, the majority of games will support
it.
But until then, people who use DSR are getting the worst of both worlds.
And there's a reason that I've been talking about 4X DSR.
There are other options available but I don't see the point of them.
The others render your game at very strange resolutions then try to cram them into your
display.
Mathematically, it doesn't fit nicely and results in a dilemma.
When you enable DSR you can choose the smoothness.
At 0% it's crystal clear, at 100% it's as blurry as FXAA.
I can't show you images of this since it's only changing the way it's downscaling for
your monitor.
With 4x DSR I suggest leaving it at 0 smoothness since then you get the nice antialiasing effect
mentioned earlier.
With anything other than 4X, you have to enable smoothing otherwise stuff like this happens.
You can't cheat maths.
Even with smoothing, things wobble and judder as you move in-game since certain rows of
pixels seem to have greater importance and size than others.
If you want to use DSR I would advise you go for the full 4X which doubles the resolution
in both dimensions and gives you a decent result.
Because of these issues, I can't recommend DSR.
It's nice to have the option and it's great for taking 4K resolution screenshots- if you
can manage to grab them- but it's impractical if you want to play the games.
I feel as though it could gain another purpose in the future as a way of emulating 4K on
older games that don't natively support it.
For now, however, I think I'll stick to supersampling.
No, I'm not good enough.
16XQ for me.