‘PERHAPS YOU BELONG IN SLYTHERIN’
IF you’re playing Hogwarts Legacy, STOP! For you’re probably doing it wrong. Go
straight to the settings menu and enable upscaling. Why? Because it gives you more,
for free. It’s as close to magic as you can get.
It doesn’t matter how fast or how slow your PC is- just as long as you have a PC. If the
option’s there to upscale then it’s always worth it, as it gives you either higher framerates,
higher resolutions, or enough extra computing power to ramp the other graphics settings up
instead. All of those choices are up to you. But one thing is NOT: for you MUST
enable upscaling. I command you to. So there are 3 upscalers worth using,
and 2 that aren’t. Choose wisely. You can forget about these- these essentially sharpen the image.
Which is better than nothing? But a lot worse than the other options,
and since the other options are available, it makes the bad ones kind of pointless.
Just to prove a point, here is FSR 1, which is the bad sort, VS FSR 2. Which
is the good kindNothing needs to be said here that your eyes can’t already tell you:
FSR 2 is undeniably better in every conceivable way.
So that’s why I recommend using one of THESE 3 upscalers, which are all good, and all work in a
similar way, by building up a better-looking image than were you not to use them. To save you having
to watch any more of this video, I’ll just tell you to enable FSR 2, set it to ‘performance’ mode,
and if you feel the image looks too shimmery for your liking then set it to Quality instead. Done.
That’s as simple as I can make it. BUT carry
on watching if you want to know more about the dark art that is upscaling.
WELCOME to Professor Kliks’ Upscaling 101 class.
Nvidia makes DLSS, AMD makes FSR, and Intel makes XESS. THEY want us to pronounce it
X-E-S-S. But no! So you’d think if you had an Intel card you’d only be able to use
XESS and so on. But NO! It doesn’t work like that- because EVERYONE can use FSR and XESS,
no matter which graphics card you have. Isn’t that nice of them! Of these two that anyone can use,
FSR 2 has been around for longer and in my opinion looks better. And has more features,
like an Ultra Performance option and adjustable sharpness. XESS doesn’t allow for this just yet.
And since some people think more sharpness equals more quality, I’d recommend trying FSR and ramping
the sharpness up to maximum; this will tell you if you’re one of those people. And if you’re not
then… turn the sharpness back down again. SIMPLE. But the more important option is THIS one,
because this actually adjusts the resolution the game runs at. And the lower the resolution,
the faster your game should run -which is better- but the more mistakes with the final image the
upscaling will make. So that’s why a good upscaler is important. So which upscaler is best? Well,
that’s a very complicated and controversial question that only a fool would confidently
answer. Though it’s definitely DLSS! Because it has the most tweaks and extras, and in my
opinion does the best all-round job. I don’t like that it’s only available to owners of RTX cards,
but if you do have one then you might as well use DLSS. HOWEVER! If you don’t have one then
don’t be disappointed- for FSR 2 and XESS are good alternatives, and are getting better all the time-
and they will get you 90% of the upscaling benefit, just enable one of these and we
can argue about the remaining 10% some other time. We’re splitting hairs here. Literally.
But say you don’t want higher framerates. Say the best image quality is the ONLY thing that matters
to you! This is where another feature of DLSS comes in, which is known as DLAA, which you can
enable like so. This feature uses all of DLSS’s tricks to improve the image quality, but it starts
of at your monitor’s resolution. So think of it as being the ultimate version of antialiasing. So if
you REALLY hate jagged edges to stuff and sprinkly looking hair, then DLAA is your best chance to
eliminate all that distracting stuff. If this still isn’t enough then you’ll want to consider
downscaling but I won’t cover that in this video. Unfortunately, DLAA and DLSS, are only available
for certain Nvidia owners. So for the rest of us who are wanting the highest quality
upscaling option available, then I suggest you start with XESS’s Ultra Quality setting,
because out of all the upscaling options, has the highest base resolution.
But how do you know which settings are good enough? Ignorance is bliss,
my friend. But if you REALLY have to know, and want to learn how to know, my advice with
upscaling is to drop the settings as low as you can before you start noticing the problems …and
then you raise them a bit again. Remember earlier when I said we were splitting hairs literally and
you rolled your eyes, thinking I had misused the word, ‘literally?’ HAHA! NEVER. Because a good
way to see how robust your upscaling method is is to find some hair, and to stare at it.
Because hair is HARD to render. Possibly the hardest thing for upscaling to deal with! Cos
it has to render so many sub-pixel details, and to SPLIT those hairs in half! You could say it’s
the hairy grail in videogame graphics! So what I’d do to benchmark an upscaling setting is to
find some one with a good head of hair and a big bushy beard and to get right up close to it. As
close as you dare! Almost into it. And then, to turn the upscaling setting down as far as you can
before it starts to look bad. Worse. Whatever. Come with me on a quest around Hogwarts to find
the biggest, BUSHIEST beard we can! Must be weekend cos there weren’t any
adults around Hogwarts. Just students, students everywhere and nobody this side of a picture frame
with facial hair to speak of. What a shame. Seems like all these children have been left to their
own devices in one of the most dangerous places on planet Earth! A place where they’re here to learn,
yet constantly skive from class, host illegal fightclubs underground and where almost every
exam gets cancelled because of dark lords who seem utterly obsessed, threatened and repeatedly
defeated by secondary school students. Fun fact, a VERY long time ago, someone from my family once
took Voldemort on a tour around Cornwall! ANY WAY. Here’s the back of my head,
compared using different methods of upscaling. Yes; I know there’s writing in the way. But this
writing is what’s important- for this shows how many pixels there are in each comparison. Forget
about the resulting resolution- it’s all zoomed in so that doesn’t matter any way. What matters
is how good a job each of these upscalers can do, for the number of pixels they’re based
upon. The lower the resolution, the faster your game could run. They’re all the same,
apart from the top left which should look the best and run slowest, and the top right which should
look the worst but run the fastest. So of interest here is how DLSS,
XESS and FSR quality modes compare with each other, and how closely they can resemble DLAA,
which is the golden standard in this comparison. On the right hand side is the battle of the low
quality modes, where NIS and FSR 1 alternate between each other,
and with Ultra Performance DLSS trying to compete with just ¼ the number of pixels up
above them! If this is getting too technical for you, don’t worry, I won’t say any more.
But those of you who know what you’re looking for… you know what you’re looking for here!
So yeah, DLAA and DLSS are only available to owners of RTX graphics cards, but FSR2
is kind of like DLSS, and if you mix it with downsampling then you get something similar to
DLAA. And if you really want to feel better about not having DLSS, then check this out!
If we zoom in REALLY far -I mean REALLLLY far- then you can make out pixel trails,
which makes using DLSS literally unplayable. Literally. With upscaling there’s no clear winner,
but if you don’t use upscaling at all then you’re definitely a loser!
The only thing about DLSS that you can’t imitate at the moment is the frame generation feature,
which is only available to owners of the RTX 4000 series. This frame generation tech is also
known as DLSS 3, but it’s a separate tech from the DLSS 2. It sort of works with it,
where DLSS 2 upscales the image, then DLSS 3 creates new images from that upscaled image.
This ‘sort of’ doubles your framerate again. But this doesn’t come with all the benefits
of a higher framerate. In fact, in some ways it behaves like a lower framerate
by introducing extra delay to all your actions! But trust me, this delay is only VERY small and
won’t matter in this kind of game. The REAL value to using frame generation is that it
smooths out a game’s framerate. And this is really handy in Hogwarts Legacy because it’s
currently such an unoptimized, stuttery mess! It just makes things feel more genderfluid.
So unfortunately, all these DLSS features are not available for people with other kinds of cards.
But never fear! For AMD has promised a similar sort of thing to this frame generation technology,
which they’ll roll out once they’ve figured out how to make it, and I suspect they will
rather predictably call it FSR 3. And since Harry Potter has got me into this fortune telling stuff,
I’m going to say that XESS will get the same thing at some point in the distant future
as well. Maybe they’ll call it XESS IV Any way! That’s the end of my class. Now
I’ve got to head off; these muggles aren’t going to murder themselves