Starfield to use FSR2 only, exclude DLSS2/3 and XeSS: concerns and implications *spawn*

[Flappy Pannus]

That's not true though as DLSS uses proprietary driver interfaces that are not available to regular applications. This is precisely the problem with an IHV controlling this sort of middleware and why people should be pushing for API standards that allow expressing it and other similar algorithms in a portable way.

I think their point is more that AMD is not including hardware blocks like Intel's XMX or Nvidia's Tensor cores in their GPU's that, so far, seem pretty integral to deliver the quality Xess/DLSS does at an acceptable level of performance. If they want to make the case that DLSS is redundant, then they need to do that by presenting a solution that's more competitive.

It's a wholly different thing if AMD has an open solution that can interface with similar technology across various GPU's to varying degrees, but 'overall' delivers something far closer to DLSS/Xess in quality than what FSR2 is delivering now. It's one thing if they had such a solution but Nvidia balked at integrating it with their architecture because they already have DLSS, such a stance would be far more obvious in preventing the standardization of reconstruction in PC gaming and Nvidia would rightfully get a lot more heat for it.

As of now though, you can't really expect people to take up the mantle of open standards in support of FSR when what it's delivering is inferior image quality to the majority of the PC gamer userbase compared to the popular reconstruction method that came before it. FSR as it works now for cards that don't have hardware like Intel/Nvidia do is great, more often than not it's at least better than bilinear upscaling (well, mostly). It would be far easier though for AMD to promote this as the future if they could actually show it being competitive or superior to DLSS/Xess, even if that required it to tap into custom hardware.

AMD showing say, a greatly improved FSR3 on future Radeon hardware and saying "You can get similar quality on Nvidia too if they support this Direct3D ML model" would provide the requisite pressure, but it's not there if it's "well yeah it's inferior, but...it's open" as it is now.

 

[dobwal]

Most companies would not subsidize development and marketing cost only to have some of those development dollars be invested into a competitor's technology.

It is advantageous for AMD to invest in titles that lack Nvidia technology which AMD hardware can't support. AMD wants to create the perception that gamers do not need Nvidia hardware to have a great visual experience. A visually stunning Starfield that lacks support for proprietary tech that requires Nvidia GPUs, does just that.

That will negatively affect Nvidia GPU users but its not AMD's job to cater to that crowd.

Companies often invest in attempts to undermine your products of choice. Its called competition.

 

[Andrew Lauritzen]

I think their point is more that AMD is not including hardware blocks like Intel's XMX or Nvidia's Tensor cores in their GPU's that, so far, seem pretty integral to deliver the quality Xess/DLSS does at an acceptable level of performance. If they want to make the case that DLSS is redundant, then they need to do that by presenting a solution that's more competitive.

Sure, but if speculation about ML is in any way accurate that's a pretty temporary situation. Furthermore, it seems rather plausible that DLSS could run on Intel HW and/or XeSS (the real version) could run on NVIDIA hardware as well, right? And if so, shouldn't we be able to write that code in a standard way and get the same pixels out? If not today, should we not at least be working towards that goal (noting that these processes take quite a long time)?

I'm a little confused why this is not more of a priority to people to be honest. In the DX9/10 days there was heavy pressure from users and the tech press to standardize so that we get the same experience across different IHVs who differentiate primarily on performance. The differences in those days were even less significant than stuff like upscaling (texture filtering, raster precision stuff, etc) and yet the same pressure no longer seems to exist. IMO it should, and vendor-specific solutions to things should continue to be treated as at most a stop-gap until portable APIs can cover them. The PC platform itself sacrifices much of what makes it special if we allow vendor-specific stuff to creep in too deeply.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Most companies would not subsidize development and marketing cost only to have some of those development dollars be invested into a competitor's technology.

It is advantageous for AMD to invest in titles that lack Nvidia technology which AMD hardware can't support. AMD wants to create the perception that gamers do not need Nvidia hardware to have a great visual experience. A visually stunning Starfield that lacks support for proprietary tech that requires Nvidia GPUs, does just that.

That will negatively affect Nvidia GPU users but its not AMD's job to cater to that crowd.

I mean we can pretty much shut down the majority of threads here with "Businesses do things that they feel impact their bottom line", like - no shit? The discussion here is what worth this brings to the consumer as a whole and how it's being marketed, corporations being amoral is a given.

 

[Subtlesnake]

I think their point is more that AMD is not including hardware blocks like Intel's XMX or Nvidia's Tensor cores in their GPU's that, so far, seem pretty integral to deliver the quality Xess/DLSS does at an acceptable level of performance. If they want to make the case that DLSS is redundant, then they need to do that by presenting a solution that's more competitive.

I think making ML acceleration part of the DirectX API would put more pressure on AMD to add dedicated hardware blocks. It would also prevent them from "blocking" games from shipping with ML based upscaling.

 

[dobwal]

I mean we can pretty much shut down the majority of threads here with "Businesses do things that they feel impact their bottom line", like - no shit? The discussion here is what worth this brings to the consumer as a whole and how it's being marketed, corporations being amoral is a given.

This doesn't affect consumers as a whole but rather Nvidia users. If you can accept a company investing in proprietary technology that only works with their hardware then you should be able to accept competitors investing to make that technology as irrelevant as possible.

 

[Inuhanyou]

It is Nvidia locking down their tech after all. They were prepared for segmentation of community to start with. The people saying Nvidia tech should be catered to just because they are the biggest portion of the market don't realize how that can be spun for the benefit of any monopoly of an industry. Supposedly that's not the goal is it

 

[pjbliverpool]

This doesn't affect consumers as a whole but rather Nvidia users. If you can accept a company investing in proprietary technology that only works with their hardware then you should be able to accept competitors investing to make that technology as irrelevant as possible.

But as I detailed in my earlier post, one of those practices is more "anti-consumer" than the other.

Essentially Nvidia are saying; "if you want the best upscaling tech, you have to buy our product" while AMD are saying; "we can't deliver the best upscaling tech so we're going to try and stop everyone from getting access to it".

 

[troyan]

This doesn't affect consumers as a whole but rather Nvidia users. If you can accept a company investing in proprietary technology that only works with their hardware then you should be able to accept competitors investing to make that technology as irrelevant as possible.

So i have to accept a paycheck? AMD is paying developers to not include a superior technology for >90% of the PC gaming market interested in these games. I would say no sane business person would accept something like that.

/edit: Think about your statement makes it even worse. AMD is just burning money to screw nVidia users. Instead of using it to make their software stack and hardware better they throwing it out of the window. nVidia used money to make PC gaming a much better place. And yet there are still so many people, youtubers, developers and publishers who are dismissing the huge "3DFX" effect on gaming.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Sure, but if speculation about ML is in any way accurate that's a pretty temporary situation. Furthermore, it seems rather plausible that DLSS could run on Intel HW and/or XeSS (the real version) could run on NVIDIA hardware as well, right? And if so, shouldn't we be able to write that code in a standard way and get the same pixels out? If not today, should we not at least be working towards that goal (noting that these processes take quite a long time)?

I'm a little confused why this is not more of a priority to people to be honest.

Is it really that confusing such advocacy isn't getting more attention when the only other vendor to include such hardware to make this potential future a reality is still regarded as basically a hobbyist option? I mean if Nvidia's ~85% discrete GPU market share compared to AMD means Radeon is barely on the radar of most consumers, then Arc is not even taxiing onto the runway atm.

What I'm saying is if AMD wants to advocate that approach, then they need to bring it to the table - and that starts with providing the mechanism in their own hardware to advocate for that potential. As it stands now, FSR is making the open argument but not making the quality argument, it's effectively reinforcing Nvidia's arg that custom hardware + software is necessary to provide the quality DLSS offers. AMD at least has to provide the ability for their own cards to match that quality, and then they can advocate for their approach to be adopted by the rest of industry. As it stands now, when FSR is put up against DLSS, it's found to be wanting - which is why AMD likely wants it restricted in games they fund. You can't expect gamers to take up the torch for an open standard when their exposure to it invariably means noticeably poorer visual quality to the closed source option they've been exposed to.

GPU-accelerated custom Physx is dead now (mostly) because engines advanced their physics and GPU compute utilization enough where it just didn't provide significant benefits anymore to tie effects to one vendor. That's what AMD has to do - at least give a glimpse into a wonderful future where we don't have to clamor devs to support all these competing implementations, but they're got to either improve FSR2's quality at lower input resolutions substantially through one way or another first.

I think making ML acceleration part of the DirectX API would put more pressure on AMD to add dedicated hardware blocks. It would also prevent them from "blocking" games from shipping with ML based upscaling.

Possibly, sure - I think that's what we all want. I just can't see that garnering much outside pressure from gamers though when you have a massively dominant player that brought ML upscaling to the market in the first place and already has that technology being established in the majority of recent games. I mean there's just not going to be a groundswell of pressure on MS from your average PC gamer for a hypothetical future based on unknown quality, it's another matter if AMD, like Intel, brings a superior/competitive solution to their own hardware and says "This quality can be achieved for everyone, provided we get a standardized framework". That's going to get attention.

There's also the matter of how much Nvidia's training with their supercomputer plays in the quality of DLSS. It's not just the tensor cores. Who takes over that responsibility?

 

[Flappy Pannus]

It is Nvidia locking down their tech after all. They were prepared for segmentation of community to start with. The people saying Nvidia tech should be catered to just because they are the biggest portion of the market don't realize how that can be spun for the benefit of any monopoly of an industry. Supposedly that's not the goal is it

I don't know who is saying Nvidia tech should be 'catered to', people are advocating for all reconstruction options to be included in modern games. DF has started to call out games that only have DLSS and not FSR2, and I don't like to see FSR2 excluded either - Sackboy had a ton of patches for example - they even added SER (Shader Execution Reordering)! - but they never bothered with FSR2 support which is ridiculous considering how much work they kept putting into the game otherwise.

It's one thing if doing so requires an exorbitant amount of man hours for each unique implementation, but at least the story presented so far is that the framework supporting one carries over into the other two quite readily. In fact, one of the proponents of this is AMD themselves, who said adding FSR2 to a game is but a few days work if it already has DLSS. If that is not the case, then there wouldn't be any need for any exclusion agreements with AMD, devs would just come to to the conclusion that their efforts are best spent supporting the open standard that everyone can use (remember there are millions of Nvidia cards out there without tensor cores too!).

This is not about supporting DLSS at the exclusion of FSR2. AMD is apparently the one that wants FSR at the exclusion of DLSS though.

 

[DavidGraham]

Reminder that people want DLSS specifically in Starfield because this game is going to be heavily CPU bound, even more so for people with high end hardware (those who want to push max settings and max fps), depriving people from DLSS, means there will be no DLSS3, which helps alot in this case (pushing high fps despite being CPU limited).

The Callisto Protocol is one other example of this, the game remains massively CPU bound to this day, DLSS3 would have helped a lot, but people are locked out of it because the game only supports FSR2. The same situation is happening exactly in Jedi Survivor game.

PC gamers want tech that improves their experience, and right now they are being deprived of that, which makes them angry, especially in the current landscape of frequent bad PC ports.

 

[troyan]

And ommiting DLSS 3 means no reflex either. So nVidia users have not only worse image quality and lower frames, they have to live with higher input latency, too.

 

[dobwal]

But as I detailed in my earlier post, one of those practices is more "anti-consumer" than the other.

Essentially Nvidia are saying; "if you want the best upscaling tech, you have to buy our product" while AMD are saying; "we can't deliver the best upscaling tech so we're going to try and stop everyone from getting access to it".

Not really?

They are basically two sides of the same coin.

Integration of DLSS comes at a cost in which the benefits are not realized by AMD owners. Why would AMD feel compelled to finance its support? As an AMD GPU owner, why would you ever want AMD to monetarily support features exclusively tied to Nvidia hardware? Wouldn't you as AMD GPU owner want every dollar invested by AMD going towards making your experience the best it can be?

Lack of integration of DLSS comes at a cost for Nvidia owners as well as they can't take advantage of hardware provided by their GPUs. So its only natural Nvidia GPU owners would hate any developer or pubs engaging into these types of agreements with AMD.

My opinion is that neither AMD or Nvidia are in the wrong. Nvidia should be free to create proprietary technology and AMD should feel free not to support that technology in any form or function. There would be no DLSS (a very worthwhile tech) without Nvidia's proprietary practices but we would be stuck with only GSync if AMD didn't try to compete and nullify the need for such technology.

 

[troyan]

So, you saying Intel should have paid Core Design to not support 3DFx 3d cards because only a few one have such one but everyone had a Intel CPU? Yeah.

 

[Inuhanyou]

I don't know who is saying Nvidia tech should be 'catered to', people are advocating for all reconstruction options to be included in modern games. DF has started to call out games that only have DLSS and not FSR2, and I don't like to see FSR2 excluded either - Sackboy had a ton of patches for example - they even added SER (Shader Execution Reordering)! - but they never bothered with FSR2 support which is ridiculous considering how much work they kept putting into the game otherwise.

It's one thing if doing so requires an exorbitant amount of man hours for each unique implementation, but at least the story presented so far is that the framework supporting one carries over into the other two quite readily. In fact, one of the proponents of this is AMD themselves, who said adding FSR2 to a game is but a few days work if it already has DLSS. If that is not the case, then there wouldn't be any need for any exclusion agreements with AMD, devs would just come to to the conclusion that their efforts are best spent supporting the open standard that everyone can use (remember there are millions of Nvidia cards out there without tensor cores too!).

This is not about supporting DLSS at the exclusion of FSR2. AMD is apparently the one that wants FSR at the exclusion of DLSS though.

If that's the case then I totally agree with you. But I have seen people saying DLSS should only be the priority because FSR2 is "terrible" and "nobody uses it" and "Nvidia has highest market share so their technologies should be prioritized by default by developers" despite the fact that FSR2 is clearly much more universal. And that's the argument my post is aiming at. If you want all platforms to be treated with XeSS, FSR and DLSS I am all for it. But I don't think any should have inherent priority if they are all so easy to add into existing games

 

[dobwal]

So, you saying Intel should have paid Core Design to not support 3DFx 3d cards because only a few one have such one but everyone had a Intel CPU? Yeah.

Stop making stuff up. I'm not saying AMD or Nvidia "should" be doing anything. I'm saying there is nothing wrong with the proprietary nature of DLSS or AMD moves not to support it.

 

[davis.anthony]

Stop making stuff up. I'm not saying AMD or Nvidia "should" be doing anything. I'm saying there is nothing wrong with the proprietary nature of DLSS or AMD moves not to support it.

No but there is something wrong with blocking the use of a competitors superior solution.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I think their point is more that AMD is not including hardware blocks like Intel's XMX or Nvidia's Tensor cores in their GPU's that, so far, seem pretty integral to deliver the quality Xess/DLSS does at an acceptable level of performance. If they want to make the case that DLSS is redundant, then they need to do that by presenting a solution that's more competitive.

It's a wholly different thing if AMD has an open solution that can interface with similar technology across various GPU's to varying degrees, but 'overall' delivers something far closer to DLSS/Xess in quality than what FSR2 is delivering now. It's one thing if they had such a solution but Nvidia balked at integrating it with their architecture because they already have DLSS, such a stance would be far more obvious in preventing the standardization of reconstruction in PC gaming and Nvidia would rightfully get a lot more heat for it.

As of now though, you can't really expect people to take up the mantle of open standards in support of FSR when what it's delivering is inferior image quality to the majority of the PC gamer userbase compared to the popular reconstruction method that came before it. FSR as it works now for cards that don't have hardware like Intel/Nvidia do is great, more often than not it's at least better than bilinear upscaling (well, mostly). It would be far easier though for AMD to promote this as the future if they could actually show it being competitive or superior to DLSS/Xess, even if that required it to tap into custom hardware.

AMD showing say, a greatly improved FSR3 on future Radeon hardware and saying "You can get similar quality on Nvidia too if they support this Direct3D ML model" would provide the requisite pressure, but it's not there if it's "well yeah it's inferior, but...it's open" as it is now.

On the flip side why is DLSS blocked off from Intel hardware? At least Intel allows XeSS to run on non-Intel hardware, albeit it's not optimized. NV doesn't allow DLSS on any non-NV hardware, period. I mean it doesn't get any more closed than that.

I get NV users being sad that it's not in there, but developers don't owe it to anyone to even put in an effort to put in DLSS/FSR/XeSS. But if you're only going to put in one, you're better off putting in the one that runs on everyone's hardware including the consoles.

Personally, I still couldn't give a rodent's behind if any of them are included as an option as long as when it is offered I can turn them off.

I'm just trying to imagine people getting pissed off at a developer not including AO or dynamic resolution scaling or motion blur or...

I get even more puzzled when people clamor for a closed box solution that a developer may or may not want to include. Perhaps a developer is very much against closed platform (hardware) solutions and will only include open source solutions if one is available?

If that were the case, who would they even choose to partner with? NV, where practically everything is closed platform? Or AMD where just about everything is open source and open platform?

Sure maybe AMD partnered titles prohibit the use of DLSS or maybe they don't. You think the developer doesn't know that? If it's a problem for the developer and goes against what the developer wants, then why even partner with AMD? The fact that they partner with AMD knowing this (assuming AMD does actually prohibit it) could be indicative of them preferring to not include vendor specific (locked) implementations of things, rather than somehow AMD coercing them into it.

Regards,
SB

 

[Flappy Pannus]

On the flip side why is DLSS blocked off from Intel hardware? At least Intel allows XeSS to run on non-Intel hardware, albeit it's not optimized. NV doesn't allow DLSS on any non-NV hardware, period.

"Not optimized" is an understatement - it's usually well below FSR quality and significantly less performant, XESS without Intel hardware really may as well not exist with what it brings to the table. Nobody is using XESS without Arc. Not going to trumpet their 'gift' to the industry by making a really shitty version of their tech open source. Maybe that will change in the future though.

And yeah - maybe DLSS could run well on Intel hardware, I'd love to see it! But like I'm saying, it's obvious why Nvidia is not being asked about this by gamers, because ARC users barely register. I'm saying you can't wonder why more pressure isn't being put on devs for an open standard when the #2 IHV hasn't made their own case for a competitive hardware solution.

I mean it doesn't get any more closed than that.

Well, you could effectively get more 'closed' that that actually - by not bothering to make the open-source SDK Streamline, or by making FSR exclusion part and parcel to be Nvidia sponsored. Nvidia have come out and said flatly they don't do that, no ifs ands or buts - and they make software that actually assists the inclusion of their competitors solutions easier to boot.

Now, maybe working with Streamline actually sucks or is too limiting for making the most of FSR/Xess, then it's just a marketing fig leaf. I'd like to hear from devs who've used it. But even without it, adding in other implementations is not supposed to be arduous. On that:

I get NV users being sad that it's not in there, but developers don't owe it to anyone to even put in an effort to put in DLSS/FSR/XeSS. But if you're only going to put in one, you're better off putting in the one that runs on everyone's hardware including the consoles.

Again, the point is that adding another reconstruction method after you're already done the legwork for one, by all indications, is relatively straightforward. This is a different matter if it's prohibitive in development work. AMD themselves have literally marketed how easy it is to add FSR if you've laid the groundwork for DLSS already though, so a little difficult to make that case when the very vendor this is about is saying how easy it is to add, and of course Nvidia is saying the same thing, hence Streamline.

I'm just trying to imagine people getting pissed off at a developer not including AO or dynamic resolution scaling or motion blur or...

I mean I certainly don't like it when dynamic resolution is in a console release and not the PC, and Alex said as much in his 2002 PC games disaster video. I'm a big fan of dynamic res, when it works well. I wish it were more common in the PC space and have said so repeatedly, but I also have come to understand it's far easier to support on consoles. That's largely beside the point though when we're talking about one IHV actively restricting the implementation of a graphical feature as a prerequisite to receive support funding, and another doesn't.

If it turned out that Nvidia sponsored titles were prohibiting the inclusion of FSR as a requirement for Nvidia sponsorship, this would also be a story making the rounds and people would be rightfully upset too. My position wouldn't be "Well they're free to do that" - and yes, they are - but as a consumer, I'm also free to say it sucks.

Perhaps a developer is very much against closed platform (hardware) solutions and will only include open source solutions if one is available?

Once again, that's not the contention here. If a developer only included FSR2 because they need to budget their meagre dev time and have to choose one method that supports the widest userbase possible, then fine. The contention here is that this decision to exclude the option of another, superior solution is being forced by management and has little do with with either development time budget or some appeal to open source as a moral principle. I mean, it's a little difficult to really stake an ethical argument on closed vs. open source when you accept the funding from a single IHV where an explicit stipulation is you don't even have the freedom to choose to work with the technology from another vendor.

Sure maybe AMD partnered titles prohibit the use of DLSS or maybe they don't.

It should be pretty clear we're well past the speculation stage at this point, come on. AMD's response is pretty damning. They could have shut this speculation down in an instant, they chose not to for a very obvious reason.

You think the developer doesn't know that? If it's a problem for the developer and goes against what the developer wants, then why even partner with AMD? The fact that they partner with AMD knowing this (assuming AMD does actually prohibit it) could be indicative of them preferring to not include vendor specific (locked) implementations of things, rather than somehow AMD coercing them into it.

Sure, maybe their personal philosophy and being given funding that forces them to adhere to that philosophy lines up perfectly!