Welcome to a bonus video for all of my observations when testing DLSS in Control, and how it compares
with when it’s disabled. Although Nvidia would describe DLSS as an upscaler, I’d
rather describe it as a mixture of anti-aliasing and sharpening, and it certainly tackles the
problem in some new and rather interesting ways, which I’ll show in this video. It’s
meant to use AI trained on high-res images of the game to intelligently blur jagged edges,
but I’ve heard it might not even use that in this game. It doesn’t matter. I’ll
judge it on how it performs in the game, using a Geforce 2080 TI.
Running Control, on absolute maximum settings, at native 4K is… not a good idea. I got
20-25 FPS and it wasn’t a lot of fun. Dropping to 1440p with DLSS increased it to a very
playable 40-50 FPS which I felt was okay, though disabling a few of the more problematic
raytraced features certainly smoothed it further and edged it closer to the magical 60 FPS
mark. And at 1080p, it remained well above 60 FPS
at all times even with everything on. But again, remember I’m using a 2080 TI here
so you’d hope this would be the case. But for this video, most of it will be rendered
at below 1080p… and then zoomed in. Because a lot of the changes DLSS makes are at the
pixel level and this isn’t too visible when viewing the screen as a whole. Especially
what with Youtube coming along and being all compressed and stuff. So just remember that
what’s shown in this video might not be quite so noticeable when actually playing
the game at a proper resolution. So how is DLSS in Control better than it used
to be? I think the main reason is that, at least now, it’s honest. It doesn’t just
claim to be 4K while actually running at a lower resolution. It shows you what resolution
it’s running at, and lets you choose different base resolutions. And it works at any screen
resolution. In other words: while these improvements still don’t give DLSS any real benefits
over other methods, its implementation in Control does remove a lot of its disadvantages!
This made it easier for me to run about and to see what DLSS actually does to the image.
So you know: I don’t think you can run Control without anti-aliasing. You can choose to use
MSAA, DLSS, or without either it still looks like it uses temporal. So in this video I’ll
be comparing DLSS to that. Temporal is already quite an effective form of anti-aliasing that’s
widely used in modern games. To summarise: DLSS typically runs 1-2 FPS slower, which
depending on resolution can be somewhere between 2-5%. I could have sworn the difference was
greater than that when I first tested it, but I tried all kinds of resolution combinations
and it remained, at most, just a frame or two slower. DLSS was better at retaining detail
on things when in motion while TAA would pixelate the whole thing. But this came at a price-
it introduces visual ‘bugs’- you can make out halos around things in the foreground,
which I think is it attempting to use data from past frames and somewhat failing. I think
you’ll agree that the plants in the foreground look BETTER with DLSS. They retain their smooth
edges and the definition on thin blades of grass. It’s just that it’s at the expense
of the background. DLSS appears to prioritise things in the foreground, and it’s down
to personal preference whether you think that’s an improvement.
The visual artefacts reminded me of the effect you get when converting 30 FPS videos into
60. Obviously slowed down at a base resolution of 720p is a worst-case scenario- if you use
a higher base resolution like 1080p or 1440p, and run the game at normal speeds then it’s
nowhere near as noticeable. Anyway, by spending endless hours, running
about these same boring old corridors at different settings and resolutions, I’ve grown familiar
with DLSS and how it works. I can now identify when it’s on, and wish to share with you
what I’ve learned. Comparing the first frame of a new viewpoint,
where it has no past frames to help anti-alias the image, reveals how DLSS works- when faced
with a fresh, aliased image, it paints a low-resolution, defocused waterpainting of it that blots out
high contrast spots, then fills in the details over the next dozen or so frames. The first
frame is technically inferior to regular anti-aliasing techniques, but I think to the human eye,
it looks BETTER by minimising the number of stray, high-contrast pixels. We don’t notice
the water-paint effect on the first frame as much as we would a high-contrast area that
hadn’t been anti-aliased! I say it takes a dozen or so frames for it to reach maximum
quality, but within a fraction of that it’s already pretty much there.
Its defocused approach reduces the speckly look of noisy surfaces, and while both methods
suffer from ‘flicker’, I think DLSS can end up using more individual frames than temporal
does as its ‘flicker’ is slower. This sometimes worked against it, producing a far
more noticeable flickering effect, particularly on this transparent glass- which unfortunately
for DLSS is EVERYWHERE! AHAHAHAHAH!!!! So it’s not a clear-cut victory for DLSS.
Apart from in THIS example, it’s generally a cautious type of anti-aliasing- it would
rather blur, or even HIDE, high contrast edges entirely. A perfect example of this is on
the wires holding up the lights here! Temporal shows a rather aliased result, while DLSS
chickens out and effectively removes them completely!
I thought the edges of these pipes were interesting. DLSS removed jaggies more consistently than
Temporal could, whilst somehow managing it with less blur. I think sharpening deserves
some praise here- you can definitely see the contrast being upped along edges in the DLSS
example, almost as though Nvidia are borrowing from AMD’s FidelityFX. Despite Temporal’s
greater amounts of blur, you can still make out the pixel-stepping along some edges. Not
sure if this is from the anti-aliasing or from the upscaling… but luckily, since I’m
only comparing the end images… I can simply say that DLSS does it better.
There’s a graphics feature in Control that really doesn’t play nicely with DLSS- and
that’s the Ray Traced Indirect Diffused Lighting in this game. In fact, it comes with
a whole host of its own problems as well. I guess it’s a more accurate simulation
of ambient occlusion, but it’s not really worth using because it adds smeary artefacts
around anything moving. It tanks framerates, and when DLSS is enabled, it makes some surfaces
look horribly pixelated. The worst offender being this wall here.
DLSS appears just to upscale this effect without making any effort to smooth the result, meaning
you’re left with obvious low-resolution squares across some of the walls in the game.
I prefer TAA’s solution to it, which is to blur it all back to 1999!
Since it does tend to run 1-2 FPS slower than TAA, and doesn’t always deliver superior
results, I wouldn’t say that DLSS is a clear-cut victory in Control, but it certainly deals
with aliasing that Temporal might otherwise miss and I do find something appealing about
such a novel solution. If you’re anything like me then, before this, you may have assumed
that DLSS adds ‘detail’ to the upscale, when in actual fact it just offers a relatively
alias-free solution that can, if given enough time, provide a low-blur, high quality result,
with fewer upscale artefacts than with Temporal alone.
But when DLSS goes wrong, it goes VERY wrong. So that’s a taste of the DLSS implementation
in Control. See the main video for more information on it!