Welcome back PCWorld fans with another major title getting the DLSS love.
This time it takes place in the Wild West with Red Dead Redemption 2.
This game burst onto the PC scene all the way back in late 2019 with some of the most breathtaking
visuals seen in an open-world game. By today’s standards, Rockstar’s RAGE Engine continues to be
not just a gorgeous display of next-gen API power but also a high-end system’s worst nightmare when
you crank the settings. BUT with DLSS things could change drastically for NVIDIA RTX series owners.
In this video, I’m going to break things down and see how well it performs,
deconstruct the visual differences, talk about what didn’t go quite right,
and show you how you can fix it to get the best combination of performance and visuals.
But before I get into the specifics of the DLSS implementation in Red Dead Redemption 2, I wanted
to take a moment and give a quick refresher on what DLSS is to those who may not be following
the tech that closely. DLSS was introduced with Nvidia’s RTX 20 series and is an acronym for
Deep Learning SuperSampling, which takes advantage of their hardware-based Ai Tensor Cores.
In real-time, this hardware takes a lower internal resolution image from the game and uses machined
learning through super high-resolution assets from the game to reconstruct the final image
as close to native as possible. It does this by combining motion vectors, temporal data,
and machined learning. With the latest DLSS 2.0+ the results range from decent to stunning,
and a lot of it comes down to the developer and how they implement the tech. And that’s where we
should talk about Red Dead Redemption 2’s DLSS implementation, and where the problem arises.
You see, the first wave of people to test Red Dead Redemption 2’s DLSS final image
were not impressed, and rightfully so. If you were to load up the game in DX12 (because Vulkan is a
bit of a mess from my experience) and crank the details while enabling DLSS, you’ll likely notice
some issues. Issues like things being a bit blurry in the distance, assets not rendering properly on
light poles and powerlines, lots of ghosting on the power lines, as well as one of the biggest
issues: being missing shadow elements. Right away people got a really bad taste in their mouth,
which is unfortunate because the performance gains are quite nice.
Now, let’s talk about what went wrong and how to fix it. DLSS by nature is temporal, it takes
data from multiple frames to finish out an image. Temporal Anti Aliasing is, by default,
disabled when you enable DLSS, as DLSS replaces TAA as the anti-aliasing method used. But what
gets left on is TAA Sharpening, and that causes the algorithm to get a bit wonky, which results
in the issues that people have been pointing out. Disable TAA Sharpening and you’ll instantly see a
much more crisp image with almost all artifacts removed. To do this you’ll need to unlock the
‘locked’ settings, scroll down to TAA Sharpening, and slide the bar all the way to the left. That
is the best way to set it up because there is no reason to add temporal instability to the image.
With that out of the way, let’s get onto image quality comparisons! To demonstrate this,
I used an AverMedia Livegamer 4K capture card in my workstation machine to capture a 4K output
from my gaming rig running a Founder’s Edition RTX 3080. In each example, I ran the game at maximum
detail settings, but with the aforementioned TAA Sharpening filter disabled for the DLSS results.
The part of the game we’ll be looking at is actually the last section from the built-in
benchmarking utility where the game runs a like for like section of the game. I’m doing it this
way so that we get to see this one in motion as I believe it gives a better look at the experience
you’ll get when playing the game. I’ll leave you for a moment to see for yourselves if you
can tell the difference of how things change as we move down the list of DLSS quality options,
then I’ll move on to the performance impact.
*let
comparison reel playthrough*
From a visual standpoint, with the fix applied, you’ll see the game responded very well.
But what does all that matter if there is no performance increase along with
it? In order to show this, I took a look at the same scene from two different angles,
both running the game at maximum settings. The first is from an RTX 3060 running at 1440p,
and I found that going from Native to Quality netted me a respectable 20% performance jump with
practically identical image quality. When I set it to Performance we only go up 33%
in performance but the image quality hit is noticeable at this level.
Quality got us over the 60FPS hump, so I’d stick with that on this level of GPU for a good mix.
If you’re cruising on a super high-end RTX 3080 you can expect to break the 100FPS barrier at
1440p. But this card already handled the game nicely at that resolution, so 4K is the focus I
wanted to have here. At Native settings the RTX 3080 is able to skirt that 60FPS line,
but when Quality DLSS is applied it really smooths it out thanks to a 21% performance bump. At 4K I
would feel comfortable moving down to the Balanced settings and enjoying a further increase of 29%
over native, but at that point, you’re going to start to notice the artifacts around the power
lines and trees more. If that doesn’t bother you then feel free to try out Performance, but I’d
urge you to give Ultra Performance a pass unless you’re on a 5K or greater panel.
With some hiccups along the way, we were able to see that DLSS is a nice option to have for
such a demanding game. RTX owners who wish to take advantage of DLSS in Quality mode
will get a nice bump up in performance, and even more, if you are okay with going to
Balanced or lower for the settings. But Rockstar should certainly fix the TAA Sharpening problem
with an update to the game, as it’s confusing and could hurt people's experience.
For me, I’ll personally be sticking to the Quality setting as I always do,
but I’d love to hear your experience with DLSS and what you prefer. Thanks for joining
me in this look at Red Dead Redemption 2, hit the like button if you enjoyed it,
and make sure you’re subscribed to PCWorld for more PC Hardware and gaming goodness.