Upscaling Technology Has Become A Crutch

Dictator said:
I saw it live Just Yesterday where I could Test it on and off in Alan Wake, CP2077 and Portal RTX vs. NRD and other denoisers - DLSS 3.5 really wrecks NRD and any other denoising I have ever seen. Really impressive!

Beyond massively boosting inner surface quality and detail and light propagation from undersampling, it also cut down in Image/lighting Retention and ghosting.
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That's great to hear! That's actually my primary issue with the PT CP2077 path - while it improves visuals a bit personally it doesn't do it enough to compensate for the large amount of noise it adds. If this takes care of that better I'm happy to hear it. I'm definitely interested in seeing Alan Wake 2 as well as I'm a big fan of Control.

The concept certainly makes sense and I certainly believe it's a place that ML can do a good job. That said, it's hard to imagine this isn't a major chunk of dependencies and inputs/outputs and this time right smack in the *middle* of a frame. Not to re-open this conversation but... this really cannot be the long term solution here. We need the hardware exposed properly so that games and renderers can implement similar passes. I realize NVIDIA would love to just replace game renderers with their own custom one (and with all of these things it is getting close), but this is not a healthy long term direction for the industry, nor gamers.

Dictator said:
We should have impressions in latest df direct
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Looking forward to that!
 
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Here we go again with Starfield again. 93 fps for the 4090 at 1080p for a game that looks this bad? It’s not even next gen looking at all. 7900xtx faster at 1080p and 1440p? I think at this point, it cannot be denied that upscaling is a giant crutch. This game has no scale, it’s all a facade. Looks worse than games like cyberpunk and even worse than last gen games while running significantly worse. Horrible.
 
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BitByte said:
I think at this point, it cannot be denied that upscaling is a giant crutch. This game has no scale, it’s all a facade. Looks worse than games like cyberpunk and even worse than last gen games while running significantly worse. Horrible.
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It absolutely can be denied. Saying it looks worse than last gen games really just shows you cant be taken seriously. I have no nice way of saying that here.

I cant stress enough - reconstruction was always going to become normalized. Developers are not lazy or incompetent. Bethesda has never been the best at technical aspects of their games, but they are also absolutely doing a lot more than people will see on the surface. The scope is there, no matter how much you want to deny it.

You're just struggling to come to grips with the rise in demands of true next gen titles. I mean, Bethesda games have never been 'super fast' games in terms of performance to begin with. All this was 100% predictable if you had sane expectations.
 
Seanspeed said:
It absolutely can be denied. Saying it looks worse than last gen games really just shows you cant be taken seriously. I have no nice way of saying that here.
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If you actually played the game, you'd know this.... The best looking thing in the is the hand crafted indoor areas like your ship and some building interiors. The rest is not great and the procedural generation is even worse. I gave Jedi fallen order a hard time and this game on the balance of things looks worse.... Keep in mind that fallen order was released on the ps4.

"Next gen"
HyZHNyJ.jpg

https://www.reddit.com/r/Starfield/comments/1681bzo

Seanspeed said:
I cant stress enough - reconstruction was always going to become normalized. Developers are not lazy or incompetent. Bethesda has never been the best at technical aspects of their games, but they are also absolutely doing a lot more than people will see on the surface. The scope is there, no matter how much you want to deny it.
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Prove it. I've yet to see what they're doing under the hood that's so impressive. Can't fly anywhere because the planets are levels and space doesn't actually exist. Bad physics, bad animation, procedurally generated content looks poor. Combat looks like a mod. Ai is bad. Everything is connected by load screens.
NMS runs on switch and their technology is a generation ahead of starfield with a team of less than 30 people as of 2020.
Seanspeed said:
You're just struggling to come to grips with the rise in demands of true next gen titles. I mean, Bethesda games have never been 'super fast' games in terms of performance to begin with. All this was 100% predictable if you had sane expectations.
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I'm not struggling to come to grips with anything. There are very few next-gen parts of starfield. What techniques are they using that's next gen? Rendering wise, what are they doing that is far ahead of other developers? Technology wise, what systems have they implemented that is so impressive that others are looking to emulate? The truth of the matter is that the studio is technically incompetent. They're so bereft of technical competence that other Microsoft studios were needed to get the game into its current state. They have a serious and well documented history of technical incompetence. Fallout 76, 0fps skyrim ps3, sub 30 fps games ps4 are some of the well documented examples of technical incompetence. Trying to argue that Starfield is next gen and the performance profile is justifiable is a bridge too far.
 
Are people saying Starfield is “next gen”? Seems most favorable comparisons are to other Bethesda games - Fallout, Skyrim etc. I haven’t seen anyone claim it’s a technical masterpiece compared to other recent titles.

It took me years to finish New Vegas and by the time I was done the graphics were extremely rough even fully modded up. I didn’t mind much except for the Dead Money DLC. Art / graphics were atrocious especially in the outdoor areas. Haven’t even started Fallout 4 yet. Will be a few years before I get to Starfield but the presentation values look solid enough to not be vomit inducing in the future. The character animations are decidedly wonky though.
 
Starfield looks fantastic in the eyes of millions. Not because it is technically so next-gen, but because the overall effect of the display is really good, it can be very realistic.

And FSR works really well on Xbox, UPSCALE TECHNOLOGY IS GREAT! ...you just need to know how to use it well.
 
fsr in starfield, from what I've seen in videos, looks way better when the camera isn't moving. When the camera moves it almost looks like motion blur, even if motion blur is turned off. Overal gameplay is far more important than graphics, and Bethesda still has a niche that isn't really filled by many games. Interior areas can look very good and some of the models are very detailed. Outdoors the game can look okay to poor. I'd say that kind of early afternoon lighting, when the sun would be at it's peak, is when the game looks worse. The lighting just ends up looking very flat across everything.
 
Scott_Arm said:
Outdoors the game can look okay to poor. I'd say that kind of early afternoon lighting, when the sun would be at it's peak, is when the game looks worse. The lighting just ends up looking very flat across everything.
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Yea we’ve seen that particular problem crop up a lot in many games that use that type of lighting system. I think what is typically missing here is better shadows and much higher reflection quality. Typically in afternoon sun, everything should be sparkling.
 
Upscaling tech overall has been a godsend but can also be poorly implemented as we've seen in many instances. But the beauty is the tech keeps getting better and better within short periods of time and there are so many options and implementations for developers to choose from, whether hardware or software based. We already know how incredible dlss has been and as DF explained recently image reconstruction has allowed gamers to experience higher quality pixels enhanced by cutting edge rendering paradigms (ray tracing). Even the software side has much to offer. Consider Horizon Forbidden West checkerboard implementation: targets 3200x1600 checkerboard which is roughly 1296p equivalent or 2.89 million native pixels. I think it provides much better results than what we've seen from FSR2, which is often the whipping boy for image reconstruction naysayers. It's all about implementation and algorithms applied, which get better by the day.

 
I'mDudditz! said:
Upscaling tech overall has been a godsend but can also be poorly implemented as we've seen in many instances. But the beauty is the tech keeps getting better and better within short periods of time and there are so many options and implementations for developers to choose from, whether hardware or software based. We already know how incredible dlss has been and as DF explained recently image reconstruction has allowed gamers to experience higher quality pixels enhanced by cutting edge rendering paradigms (ray tracing). Even the software side has much to offer. Consider Horizon Forbidden West checkerboard implementation: targets 3200x1600 checkerboard which is roughly 1296p equivalent or 2.89 million native pixels. I think it provides much better results than what we've seen from FSR2, which is often the whipping boy for image reconstruction naysayers. It's all about implementation and algorithms applied, which get better by the day.

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The final image resolve is not the only part of the process in determining what upscaling solution to use, ease of implementation and performance cost are also factors. Checkerboarding in particular has a reputation for requiring a high degree of developer effort to get right, which is likely why despite being so hyped early on with the PS4 Pro's debut (and assisted in hardware), it's actual usage in games was relatively low. The fact that one of the most experienced first-party studios took months after launch to get it looking right further points toward this being the case.

It's very good in FW now no doubt (Days Gone is another standout), albeit it does fall down in certain aspects, such as dealing with some of the holographic displays.
 
iroboto said:
Yea we’ve seen that particular problem crop up a lot in many games that use that type of lighting system. I think what is typically missing here is better shadows and much higher reflection quality. Typically in afternoon sun, everything should be sparkling.
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Frankly, it's not even a problem if it looks poor. That's fine but, to run that badly while looking that poor? Absolutely not.
 
Scott_Arm said:
Original Results (not re-tested)
settingslowmediumhighultra
native 1440p60505044
DLSS Quality97797470
DLSS Balanced107938879
DLSS Performance1171059889
DLSS Ultra Performance137127120108
New Patch
settingslowmediumhighultra
native 1440p80756862
DLSS Quality1191109791
DLSS Balanced12712010698
DLSS Performance133129117108
DLSS Ultra Performance140138133128
New Patch w/ detailed shadows enabled
settingslow (detailed shadows)medium (detailed shadows)high (detailed shadows)ultra (detailed shadows)
native 1440p76716557
DLSS Quality1101059887
DLSS Balanced11711310697
DLSS Performance120123117107
DLSS Ultra Performance127130122120
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As a refresher, this is only one static scene that I picked because it was used in a video where someone was whining about performance (there are other scenes where performance is better or worse). Each time I've retested with a patch I'm roughly lining up the view, but it's probably not 100% accurate. The new remnant patch added a toggle for "detailed geometry", but disabling it seems to lower performance for me. The description says setting it off can increase performance on high-end cpus. There is also a new Potato preset, which looks very potato.

I have a ryzen 5600x and an RTX 3080 10GB and 16GB of DDR4 that's tuned up at 3600.

Patch 2
,detailed shadows enabled
,detailed geometry enabled
settingsPotato (new preset, detailed geomtry enabled)low (detailed geometry enabled)medium (detailed geometry enabled)high (detailed geometry enabled)ultra (detailed geometry enabled)
1440p native9878747270
DLSS Quality140117110106103
DLSS Performance160 *CPU LIMITED*136132126124
Patch 2
,detailed shadows enabled
,detailed geometry disabled
settingsPotato (new preset)lowmediumhighultra
1440p native10380757069
DLSS Quality131107999391
DLSS Performance147124116108106

Seems like I'm getting an improvement from the last patch, but I couldn't tell you what they've done to actually increase the performance (compared to previous patch with detailed shadows enabled). At native resolution it's a very large increase from launch, but again, I don't know what they've done to increase the performance.
 
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Scott_Arm said:
fsr in starfield, from what I've seen in videos, looks way better when the camera isn't moving. When the camera moves it almost looks like motion blur, even if motion blur is turned off. Overal gameplay is far more important than graphics, and Bethesda still has a niche that isn't really filled by many games. Interior areas can look very good and some of the models are very detailed. Outdoors the game can look okay to poor. I'd say that kind of early afternoon lighting, when the sun would be at it's peak, is when the game looks worse. The lighting just ends up looking very flat across everything.
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FSR2 always did a pretty good job at reconstructing a still image, it's why when it released there were a ton of just plain bad comparisons with DLSS/native saying it was on par while only testing the game in static scenes.
 
JGS_Lnt said:
FSR2 always did a pretty good job at reconstructing a still image, it's why when it released there were a ton of just plain bad comparisons with DLSS/native saying it was on par while only testing the game in static scenes.
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John from DF goes into his impressions on DLSS in Starfield here, and basically how the DLSS mod provides a significant improvement over FSR in many situations - even when the camera is still. And hell, Starfield is actually one of the better FSR implementations.
 
Flappy Pannus said:
John from DF goes into his impressions on DLSS in Starfield here, and basically how the DLSS mod provides a significant improvement over FSR in many situations - even when the camera is still. And hell, Starfield is actually one of the better FSR implementations.
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Yeah, FSR still falls apart too much in motion. Then again DLSS would fail art class with its refusal to actually obey basic perspective rules like lines getting smaller in the distance.

At this point I just run Xess wherever I can. It's the unsung hero of reconstruction, 1.2 actually looks like reference and doesn't have the DLSS artifacts, nor does it fall apart under motion like FSR2, it also runs faster.
 
Frenetic Pony said:
At this point I just run Xess wherever I can. It's the unsung hero of reconstruction, 1.2 actually looks like reference and doesn't have the DLSS artifacts, nor does it fall apart under motion like FSR2, it also runs faster.
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Would be very interesting to see a recent comparison across several games when run on an Intel GPU at least. Their DP4a path is decidedly less impressive though (albeit recently has shown better results), I've never found it to be an option due to performance on my 3060 however, quality notwithstanding.

And while I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing, DLSS's over-sharpened (?) lines, especially ones with specular highlights in the distance has always been annoying for me. I notice too many solid, thick white lines to denote specularity that can appear in the distance at times which should be scaled better.
 
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