DSR is the best new tech I can recall

[Unknown Soldier]

I've also been playing on DSR(BF4) and it's pretty, I noticed it immediately. I used the recommended setting, not 4K but the game looks really great.

Also been playing Diablo 3 but don't see DSR changes there even though it said it supported the game.

 

[Davros]

even though it said it supported the game.

I thought DSR was transparent to the game.

 

[swaaye]

Skyrim, Fallout, and any other D3D9 games that work with forced MSAA/SSAA will look better with AMD SSAA than with DSR.

 

[RobertR1]

Can you show me proof of that? I can post a Skyrim DSR screen shot and list the mods if you want to replicate on your end.

 

[swaaye]

Can you show me proof of that? I can post a Skyrim DSR screen shot and list the mods if you want to replicate on your end.

It's been discussed. DSR/VSR are essentially ordered-grid supersampling + blur. More traditional MSAA/SSAA are are a form of rotated grid sampling. It's superior to ordered-grid. You also don't get the shrunken UI elements. But the big advantage of DSR/VSR is it is independent of the game's rendering so compatibility is excellent so long as the game can handle rather high/non-standard resolutions.

But if you are playing D3D9 and older games, you should try for AMD SSAA instead of VSR/DSR. Games from before shaders added new forms of aliasing might even be best off with MSAA + TAA/AAA since this is will give a sharper image.

In the end though it's certainly a bit subjective. Use whatever you think looks best.

 

[pharma]

Thanks for reminding me ... Nvidia's MFAA should be available soon. We will get 4x MSAA with the performance hit of 2x MSAA, so will be curious to evaluate this new AA technique both in and out of DSR. Sure you can apply DSR without using any AA techniques, but the best part is visually experiencing DSR along with the effects of applying various AA techniques. @tabs link pretty much explains the concept in this article.

As far as shrunken UI elements it 's pretty much the same as what you would get when rendered in 4K. I'm pretty sure I've seen some games that actually have the option to change in-game UI screen size and may be useful feature going forward.

Edit: I think MFAA may already be available with some games but only with Maxwell cards.
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/mfaa/technology

 

[RobertR1]

So I did a comparison between DSR at 2x and BF4's built in resolution jump. To me eyes they look similar but the performance of using the BF4 slider is really poor. I go from getting 90-100fps using DSR 2x to 40's using the built in resolution scaler.

 

[Malo]

I played with MFAA when I got my 970 but the results were horrible. Think back to quincunx days.

 

[Albuquerque]

I'm curious, which game you were testing with? And how did you enable it?

 

[willardjuice]

Swaaye is correct, rotated grid will generally yield superior results to a box grid. DSR is nice, but it's just naive super sampling. The novel fact about DSR is not its quality, but rather it almost works seamlessly with everything.

 

[Albuquerque]

Swaaye is correct, rotated grid will generally yield superior results to a box grid. DSR is nice, but it's just naive super sampling. The novel fact about DSR is not its quality, but rather it almost works seamlessly with everything.

Well, there's a tiny bit more to DSR than "naive" supersampling -- the ability to scale at non-Pow2 factors is an interesting one. Rather than being stuck at 2x / 4x / 8x, you can do 1.25x / 1.5x / 1.75x / 3x. This additional granularity helps with cases where you do not have enough performance to make the next Pow2 jump, but ostensibly still have some fillrate left to burn. I realize this is still "naive" supersampling at this point, but this is granularity that the other vendors do not provide.

Additional and perhaps more importantly is the ability to "tune" the 13-tap Gaussian filter used to produce the final result. It's not a bilinear scaling algorithm, the ability to turn the knob towards either a more defined result or a more softened result is also different than the most simplistic, "naive" supersampling method.

Not saying it's better than RGSSAA, just saying it does have a few things that make it at least slightly better than OGSSAA.

 

[willardjuice]

I agree it's less naive than "normal" naive super sampling. I just meant naive wrt the method swaaye discussed.

But I think it's popular for all the reasons you just described. Often naive super sampling is too naive to be practical (hard to just enable, even scaling ratios are too expensive, too much blurring of ui, etc.). DSR provides the user an easy way to get most of the benefits of super sampling without the pitfalls. However I do agree with swaaye, blindly using DSR will not always yield the best outcome. In various situations (i.e. older games on older apis), other techniques would be more optimal.

 

[Albuquerque]

Indeed. The biggest challenge is with games that cannot scale UI correctly, and often (sadly) it's not limited to "old" games. So far, all the "old" games that I've tried have also happily enjoyed a properly scaling UI. However, none of my example games are well and truly that old, I just happened to luck out

Another something I've noticed though, older games can lose stability when facing "epic" resolution options. Case in point: Fallout 3 was never super-stable when enabling all the graphics goodies, certainly if you decided to modify the INF. Even using all of the "stock" configuration options at maximum, running FO3 in DSR 4x mode over the top of a 2560x1440 resolution causes CTD in a pretty consistent way. If you can get a solid half hour of game time, you're luck and yet also WAY overdue for some CTD action.

It's a limitation of the engine itself though, not DSR. If you scale down the panel resolution to something silly like 1280x800 and then turn on DSR 4x, it's all fine. That old engine just can't deal with extreme resolution for whatever reason.

Seems to work fine in Skyrim though, go figure. The original FarCry also plays with 4xDSR quite well too; the original Crysis / Warhead both seem to enjoy 2x / 3x DSR depending on other settings.

 

[RobertR1]

Yeah Skyrim with DSR and mods looks the best so far. BF4 is a close second. I played with BF4 at 1600p (my native res) on Ultra and it looked quite weak in comparison to DSR at 2.x

 

[I.S.T.]

What kind of games would run well with DSR on a higher than normal clocked GTX 660?

I'd like to try some of my older games, but I can't even get Arkham Asylum to run at a steady 60 FPS, so I wonder exactly how old the game needs to be...

 

[Albuquerque]

First and foremost, what is the native resolution of your display? And "how much DSR" are you thinking of enabling?

I wager you could probably play a bit of Fallout 3 / Oblivion / Fallout 3 NV with some DSR. I'd aim for games made in the middle / late 2000's myself, just because the 660 really was aimed at 1080p resolutions, not 2k / 4k resolutions.

 

[RobertR1]

Even 2xAA is a killer with DSR. I lose about 20fps in Bf4 when running 2xAA. IQ is a lot cleaner so I'm trying to determine if it's worth the tradeoff.

 

[I.S.T.]

Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention my Res(I also did not see that the topic had been replied to!). 1080p is what I run.

I was thinking 1.75 or 2.0 DSR on relatively modern games.

 

[Albuquerque]

The DSR multiplier factors relate to the total number of pixels, not the HxW of the screen raster. Thus, a 1920x1080 display has 2,073,600 pixels, running it at 2.0x DSR means you'll end up with 4,147,200 pixels to be rasterized. That's not exactly correct, it will be close to that number while still keeping the proper aspect ratio -- the actual result is 2715x1527 which is 4,145,805 pixels (just shy of 2.0x.)

Now time to think about it: how is your GTX 660 going to perform at 1520p? Not sure? How does it fare at 1440p which is more common for an actual display? On modern games, it doesn't do well at all. I'd suggest that DSR is out of reach on your hardware on "modern" games.

 

[Blazkowicz]

Does Quake 3 run with DSR?
Tried on an i7 and gtx 670 at 1080p, the framerate counter ran out of digits and showed 999 fps. Or perhaps the engine put a cap at 999 I don't know.

A relatively recent game would be CS:GO, or other high framerate and undemanding multiplayer games.

Seems to work fine in Skyrim though, go figure. The original FarCry also plays with 4xDSR quite well too; the original Crysis / Warhead both seem to enjoy 2x / 3x DSR depending on other settings

Far Cry was awesome with 4x AA and Transparency Supersampling, i.e. supersampling that would get applied by the driver on the foilage that's all other the place. Game was ruined otherwise.
Crysis 1 or was it Warhead, I did supersample it but I would end up at 800x600 on high details. Supersampled the heavy dumb way : 8xS driver AA made of 2x MSAA and 4x SSAA. I was CPU limited either way and couldn't play the game.