- 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'd expected, dang it.
Ow, I got mad and hurt myself.
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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.
TechPowerUp 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.
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 TechPowerUp directly, which,
I'm sorry, TechPowerUp, 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's 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.
While 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,
use the version that the game ship with.
DLSS 1.0, the first released,
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 DLSS so impressive to look at it 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.
DLSS 2.0 also had a different scaling factors
in its Quality, Balanced, and Performance presets,
and DLSS 2.1 added the Ultra Performance mode,
which renders at 1/3 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 worst artifacts.
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 reversions 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 a new spout lid,
but why would you?
Lttstore.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 energy
may or may not take kindly
to tinkering with these core files either.
Doom Eternal, which only recently
got DLSS and RTX support,
come stocked with 2.1.66,
but runs fine with the latest provision,
down to as low as 2.1.55.
In terms of visual fidelity,
at 10 NDP 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 come stocked 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 pitot tube at the front of the car.
This helps reduce often distracting 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 pitot 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, 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 while
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 struggled 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 the 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 free version 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,
we're treated to a slight image quality improvement.
It's pretty minor,
but the studs in Cindy's head 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 our 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 dataset 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 it's 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 FidelityFX 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' 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 scaler 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 own.
It's super simple to do this video.
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- Thanks for watching guys.
A small portion of this video's A-roll
was legit AI upscaled to 4k from five 560p.
Did you notice?
If you're feeling confident,
take a look at our recent video
of whether we could tell if DLSS was on or off.
It was fun.