Nvidia DSR doesn't work for me. Any advice?

Dr. Doom · Feb 9, 2020

Have a 2080 RTX and DSR seems to make ZERO difference to image quality on my PC.

Currently playing Wolfenstein The New Order and it looks like a horrible jaggied mess. Tried downsampling from 1440p and even 4K but no difference in IQ. I have a 40 inch 1080p TV.

What gives?

DSN2K · Feb 9, 2020

do you have UHD Colour settings on input connection correctly.

low-G · Feb 9, 2020

Some games won't properly set your new game resolution unless you enable DSR for your desktop as well (they'll even report the higher resolution they're NOT rendering in, sometimes). Annoying, I know. Don't know if Wolf is one of em.

Same for if you're not in exclusive fullscreen mode.

wiggler · Feb 9, 2020

In my experience, DSR wasn't really worth it, unless you're going 4k to 1080p. If you do a resolution that doesn't divide down easily, like 1440p to 1080p, 2D elements, like UI, end up with some weird jagged artifacts.

It's always better to up the render resolution in-game, since it'll still render 2D elements at native. If a game doesn't support it, maybe it's time to get a higher resolution screen, to go with that badass GPU?

Brandino · Feb 9, 2020

Do you have gsync on? I feel like I couldn't have DSR and gsync on. It was one or the other

low-G · Feb 9, 2020

Brandino said:
Do you have gsync on? I feel like I couldn't have DSR and gsync on. It was one or the other

No, that's no problem at all.

ss_lemonade · Feb 9, 2020

Could it be just the game? I know some games have really troublesome aliasing (like shader aliasing) that is hard to clean up, but I can't remember if this was one of them.

Deleted member 20831 · Feb 10, 2020

Dr. Doom said:
Have a 2080 RTX and DSR seems to make ZERO difference to image quality on my PC.

Currently playing Wolfenstein The New Order and it looks like a horrible jaggied mess. Tried downsampling from 1440p and even 4K but no difference in IQ. I have a 40 inch 1080p TV.

What gives?

If you take screen shots while playing the game, what is the resolution of the images which are created when you view them in a photo editor/viewer?

Pargon · Feb 10, 2020

Is game running in borderless or fullscreen mode? (borderless may not work correctly in all games)
Did you set smoothness to 0% like I see so many people recommend online? Because you should leave it at the default of 33% (and in some situations, increasing it to 50% is better).
DSR does not replace other forms of anti-aliasing. Make sure it's still enabled.

Dr. Doom · Feb 10, 2020

turboviolence said:
In my experience, DSR wasn't really worth it, unless you're going 4k to 1080p. If you do a resolution that doesn't divide down easily, like 1440p to 1080p, 2D elements, like UI, end up with some weird jagged artifacts.

It's always better to up the render resolution in-game, since it'll still render 2D elements at native. If a game doesn't support it, maybe it's time to get a higher resolution screen, to go with that badass GPU?

I've always found games with an in game resolution scale have a far cleaner IQ vs me trying to brute force DSR.

Pargon · Feb 10, 2020

turboviolence said:
In my experience, DSR wasn't really worth it, unless you're going 4k to 1080p. If you do a resolution that doesn't divide down easily, like 1440p to 1080p, 2D elements, like UI, end up with some weird jagged artifacts.

That happens because you disabled the filter which is there to prevent aliasing.
I don't know why NVIDIA even made it an option.

Isee · Feb 10, 2020

Try setting your desktop to the higher resolution and then doing the same in the game.
It should work by just just selecting the higher resolution in game, especially when using fullscreen. But sometimes it makes problems for me too.

Dr. Doom · Feb 10, 2020

This is the 4K image, despite being downsampled to 1080p on my screen, this screen is full of jaggies. I've set the smoothness at 33% for DSR. I'm not sure if this is how it is supposed to look.

APizzaPie · Feb 10, 2020

That's odd, as others have suggested you should make sure you are running in exclusive full screen mode. The smoothness should be set to 0 BTW if you are downsampling from 4k. The only other DSR resoution I used was 2880 x 1620 with smoothness set to 25%. All other DSR resolutions on a 1080P display didn't look good to me.

Pargon · Feb 10, 2020

Dr. Doom said:
This is the 4K image, despite being downsampled to 1080p on my screen, this screen is full of jaggies. I've set the smoothness at 33% for DSR. I'm not sure if this is how it is supposed to look.

The screenshot is blurry since you used Imgur (I recommend abload.de) but that looks like you're downsampling from 4K without any anti-aliasing.
Exhaust your anti-aliasing options first, before downsampling.
I'm currently downloading the game to check myself, but it could be a while.

SoulClap said:
That's odd. The smoothness should be set to 0 BTW if you are downsampling from 4k.

No, it shouldn't. A box filter cannot eliminate aliasing:

That's why NVIDIA use a gaussian filter:

SoulClap said:
Also, the only other DSR resoution I used was 2880 x 1620 with smoothness set to 25%. All other DSR resolutions didn't look good to me.

Hmm, I can't think why. Could it have something to do with you turning down/disabling the filter?
Nah, probably not…

wiggler · Feb 10, 2020

Pargon said:
That happens because you disabled the filter which is there to prevent aliasing.
I don't know why NVIDIA even made it an option.

Then I found the UI was blurry instead of jagged. DSR Makes 3D stuff look better, at the cost of the 2D stuff, but that's the trade off you make when using an external tool to up the resolution.

Dr. Doom · Feb 10, 2020

Pargon said:
The screenshot is blurry since you used Imgur (I recommend abload.de) but that looks like you're downsampling from 4K without any anti-aliasing.
Exhaust your anti-aliasing options first, before downsampling.
I'm currently downloading the game to check myself, but it could be a while.

Unfortunately The New Order has no AA options. The base game has an awful IQ. Runing the game using a fullscreen mode.

Pargon · Feb 10, 2020

Okay, so I downloaded the game (and a save for it, since it doesn't support cloud saves) and the problem in that area is shader aliasing along the top of those railings, pipes etc; combined with many of the effects being low resolution (light haze, depth of field etc).
There's not really a good solution for this, other than TAA - which the game doesn't support. It's a similar situation to Alien: Isolation, where even downsampling does very little to help (though a mod managed to inject TAA).

The best you can really do is to inject post-process AA like FXAA or SMAA with ReShade, and downsample.
Using r_multiSamples 16 (may require id5 Tweaker) is the one thing which actually does help a bit (16x "MSAA" in id Tech 5 is a special value that I think actually does some downsampling of its own) but it absolutely kills the frame rate and doesn't even hit all the edges that well.

5160x2160:

Downsampled to 1080p:

turboviolence said:
Then I found the UI was blurry instead of jagged. DSR Makes 3D stuff look better, at the cost of the 2D stuff, but that's the trade off you make when using an external tool to up the resolution.

A lot of UIs are actually aliased, since they use text and lines that are so thin - which is why they would look softer when using DSR.
But the HUD shouldn't really be your concern, unless it's a menu-driven game.

wiggler · Feb 10, 2020

Pargon said:
A lot of UIs are actually aliased, since they use text and lines that are so thin - which is why they would look softer when using DSR.
But the HUD shouldn't really be your concern, unless it's a menu-driven game.

Hey, it was enough to bother me, but to each their own.

I just feel like I couldn't get a good image quality/performance balance I liked with DSR and the games with which I tried it, however long ago that was.

Hopefully more developers add render scaling options in the future, like Destiny 2, which goes from 25% to 200%. I think we can all agree that is the better alternative.

dgrdsv · Feb 10, 2020

Pargon said:
That happens because you disabled the filter which is there to prevent aliasing.
I don't know why NVIDIA even made it an option.

You don't need it at 4X.

And anything less than 4X is mostly useless because of the way downsampling with "smoothing" is handled in DSR at the moment as you'll get more blur than anti aliasing which is completely against the point of super sampling in the first place.

Dictator · Feb 10, 2020

Pargon said:
Okay, so I downloaded the game (and a save for it, since it doesn't support cloud saves) and the problem in that area is shader aliasing along the top of those railings, pipes etc; combined with many of the effects being low resolution (light haze, depth of field etc).
There's not really a good solution for this, other than TAA - which the game doesn't support. It's a similar situation to Alien: Isolation, where even downsampling does very little to help (though a mod managed to inject TAA).

The best you can really do is to inject post-process AA like FXAA or SMAA with ReShade, and downsample.
Using r_multiSamples 16 (may require id5 Tweaker) is the one thing which actually does help a bit (16x "MSAA" in id Tech 5 is a special value that I think actually does some downsampling of its own) but it absolutely kills the frame rate and doesn't even hit all the edges that well.

5160x2160:

Downsampled to 1080p:

A lot of UIs are actually aliased, since they use text and lines that are so thin - which is why they would look softer when using DSR.
But the HUD shouldn't really be your concern, unless it's a menu-driven game.

IIRC multisamples to 16 is an NV specific option in OGL, which makes it do transparency super sampling. You can see the flag how it works in nspector

It is crazy expensive, even in doom3

Impudent Dog · Feb 10, 2020

It's a shame that ordered grid and sparse grid supersampling modes don't function beyond DX10. They always worked so well at all forms of temporal aliasing and had little to no effect on HUD elements. I could never get DSR to look as good, even when downsampling from 4k to 1080p, but I read that AMD's VSR approach is better.

Pargon · Feb 10, 2020

Dictator said:
IIRC multisamples to 16 is an NV specific option in OGL, which makes it do transparency super sampling. You can see the flag how it works in nspector

It is crazy expensive, even in doom3

I seem to recall John Carmack saying something along the lines of wanting to "experiment with anti-aliasing for the highest quality setting" in an interview about Rage.
In Rage, where it's actually presented as an option rather than a hidden command, it's certainly doing more than just increasing the sample count, and it doesn't just hit transparencies.
From what I recall, you should see that the whole image is noticeably softer (and less aliased) when it's selected, and there's a large performance hit over 8x.

It seemed more like actual supersampling, with a custom filter applied, rather than TSSAA. I haven't looked at the game in years though.

dgrdsv said:
You don't need it at 4X.

And anything less than 4X is mostly useless because of the way downsampling with "smoothing" is handled in DSR at the moment as you'll get more blur than anti aliasing which is completely against the point of super sampling in the first place.

Like I showed with the GIFs above, you do.
A box filter is not sufficient to eliminate aliasing - which is why NVIDIA use a Gaussian filter. I believe many (most?) TAA implementations do as well. Those GIFs were actually taken from a paper on Unreal Engine 4's TAA.

I strongly disagree that DSR is useless for anything other than 4x - though the smaller values like 1.2x may not be worth it, considering the small increase in resolution and softening of the image.

Impudent Dog said:
It's a shame that ordered grid and sparse grid supersampling modes don't function beyond DX10. They always worked so well at all forms of temporal aliasing and had little to no effect on HUD elements. I could never get DSR to look as good, even when downsampling from 4k to 1080p, but I read that AMD's VSR approach is better.

It's sharper, but that's not necessarily better. It also only works at specific resolutions and aspect ratios, whereas DSR can be customized to work at any resolution, so long as both dimensions are larger than the native resolution for the display.
I wish that NVIDIA would open up custom DSR resolutions officially, rather than having to use registry hacks. I'd also like the option to support custom resolutions below native in conjunction with DSR (enabling DSR locks out custom resolutions).

I agree that it's a shame SGSSAA doesn't work in most games now, because it does look really good (provided you have the correct compatibility bits set).

Nvidia DSR doesn't work for me. Any advice?

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