DLSS is Dead: New Nvidia Freestyle Sharpening Tested

Recently Nvidia rolled out a major GeForce driver update which was presented at Gamescom, version 436.02. Usually commuter updates aren't super exciting, they tend to include twenty-four hour period-one updates for new games, a few bug fixes and functioning updates, you lot know the drill. But this detail driver update is ane of the larger ones from Nvidia in recent months equally it actually introduced several new and interesting features that we'll be looking at today.

There are performance enhancements for games like Noon Legends and Forza Horizon iv, promising up to 23% faster performance compared to driver 431.sixty with some RTX GPUs. We verified this already when testing the RTX 2070 Super confronting the Radeon RX 5700 XT, these two games in particular received hefty performance gains.

Other new features include GPU integer scaling, which is fantastic for retro gaming and pixel art games. Nosotros accept 30-scrap colour support, also introduced to a recent Nvidia Studio driver. We have more M-Sync Uniform monitors. And crucially, nosotros have two new additions that rival some of AMD'due south latest features for their graphics cards.

The kickoff is a new ultra-depression latency option. This is Nvidia's response to Radeon Anti-Lag engineering science, which nosotros covered previously. Nvidia does a corking job of summarizing what this applied science does, then we'll quote them here:

"With the release of our Gamescom Game Ready Driver, nosotros're introducing a new Ultra-Low Latency Mode that enables 'merely in time' frame scheduling, submitting frames to exist rendered just before the GPU needs them. This further reduces latency by upwards to 33%. Depression Latency modes accept the most bear on when your game is GPU bound, and framerates are betwixt 60 and 100 FPS, enabling you to get the responsiveness of loftier-framerate gaming without having to subtract graphical fidelity."

Basically the same as Anti-Lag. Both technologies filibuster the CPU from gathering inputs and processing frames until just earlier the GPU is ready, reducing input lag in GPU bound scenarios. This can reduce input lag past nearly one full frame in best example scenarios. This also puts to bed the fact that Anti-Lag and this new 'Ultra Low Latency Way' are not the same as setting Max Prerendered Frames to one. Nvidia's Command Panel distinguishes between the 2 modes through a new Low Latency option, with "On" meaning the previous setting where Max Prerendered Frames = one, and "Ultra" meaning the new low latency style equivalent to Anti-Lag.

FTL: Faster Than Light running at 4K with traditional scaling on the left and 4K with Integer Scaling on the correct

We performed some brief testing with Nvidia'due south Ultra low latency mode and came to the conclusion it basically works the same as Radeon Anti-Lag. If yous're interested in learning the pros and cons of this, bank check out our previous coverage that goes into detail almost its inner workings. In general, it'due south a neat feature, only in situations that are already optimized for low latency gaming like playing at a very high framerate, it has a limited impact.

The bigger addition to this new driver is a new Freestyle Sharpening Filter. Simply recently we looked at AMD's Radeon Prototype Sharpening (RIS) and came to the conclusion that Nvidia'southward (at present dated) Freestyle sharpening was non up to par from neither a visual quality nor performance standpoint. But Nvidia has revamped their sharpening pick bachelor through Freestyle. This new filter sits as a standalone option, divide from the detail filter, that's merely called "Sharpen". It can be used in all the ways that Freestyle has been accessible for years, so that ways on whatever Nvidia GPU through GeForce Experience, provided the game is included in Nvidia's whitelist of over 600 titles covering all of DX9, DX11, DX12 and Vulkan APIs.

In this commodity we'll be covering the new sharpening filter to come across how it stacks up to some of the methods that nosotros've already tested. There are a few uncomplicated questions we want answered: Is Nvidia'south new technique as skilful or even better than Radeon Paradigm Sharpening? What is the performance impact like? And does this brand DLSS completely obsolete? That concluding i will be very, very interesting as nosotros become through some of the testing.

Our standard GPU examination setup includes a Core i9-9900K with 16GB of DDR4-3000 retention. We're also using a GeForce RTX 2070 Founders Edition, the same GPU we used for the previous RIS vs. Freestyle commodity. This (non Super) RTX GPU is in the same performance grade as AMD's Radeon RX 5700 XT and, of course, we're using the latest 436.02 drivers that are publicly available.

How to Use Freestyle Sharpening

To utilize the new sharpening filter, it'southward simple. In a supported game, hitting Alt+F3 to open upwardly the Freestyle overlay. From in that location you can choose the Acuminate filter, and you'll observe there are ii controls: one to adjust the sharpening strength and another for grain rejection. These settings are saved on an individual game basis.

Immediately this is one expanse where Nvidia has a large reward over AMD's Radeon Epitome Sharpening. RIS is a single, global toggle that applies to all games with the aforementioned strength. In that location is no slider for optimizing the filter, and it cannot be enabled on a per-game basis. This may exist one of the major flaws to RIS, because some games crave more sharpening than others, and in some games y'all may not want sharpening at all.

Image Quality Comparing

For prototype quality comparisons, let'due south showtime here with the Metro Exodus menu which is such a great test case for this blazon of filter. Here we're looking at native 4K versus the new Freestyle filter set to its default settings, which is a sharpening strength of l%. This is quite a substantial improvement to sharpness, particularly if we zoom in to some areas that might be difficult to run across at full resolution on a still image/screenshot or YouTube video (click on screenshots for 4K versions, video is also shot at 4K).

Metro, which nosotros believe uses TAA for anti-aliasing and has no fine control over the setting, is slightly blurry by default. The new Freestyle sharpening filter cleans all of this up, peculiarly in the map area with its fine lines, without introducing noticeable haloing around text elements. Information technology as well handles the purposefully blurry text on the CRT screen well.

You can see how this new filter stacks up to the old Freestyle sharpening filter, available through the detail setting, also fix to l%. Both of these filters are nonetheless available in the latest driver, but it'south clear that the old method is not equally skilful. In some areas textures are slightly sharper with the quondam fashion, but that's at the expense of worse haloing and inferior handling of fine particular, such as with the map in the upper left corner. Both modes have force sliders, but these flaws seem to be consequent across the strength ranges.

Here's where we put the new Freestyle filter upwardly against Radeon Image Sharpening. Nosotros've looked at these filters in not simply this game, but several others, and to my eyes they are virtually duplicate when the Freestyle filter is set to its default settings.

In the Metro Exodus bill of fare hither, the treatment of the card text, the map, other textures, the CRT screen then on are very close to identical, if not identical. This makes me recollect that Nvidia is using a very similar contrast adaptive shading technique, or could fifty-fifty exist the same technique given AMD's CAS filter is open source.

Switching over to The Partitioning ii, still comparing the new Freestyle filter with Radeon Prototype Sharpening. With default settings, both produce a similar outcome and that's great for those that want to use resolution downsampling. Hither the game is running at a 75% resolution scale with sharpening, and looks decent, close to a native 4K presentation in some means.

Yet to my eyes, the default settings in this game are a little also sharp. Nvidia Freestyle has a big reward in that we can tune down the sharpening force to around twenty%, which looks much better in this title and doesn't have as many oversharp artifacts. There is no such option for AMD's equivalent.

We've simply looked at resolution downsampling, which for those playing at 4K or other high resolutions, is a corking way to achieve amend performance with a minimal hit to visual quality. Set the game to a 75% resolution calibration, or around 1800p, and slap on a loftier quality sharpening filter like this new Freestyle filter or RIS and it's about like you're playing at the native resolution but with a significant functioning bump.

Of course, Nvidia has another way to reach like results, and that's through DLSS. Deep Learning Super-Sampling is a technique that attempts to reconstruct a higher resolution epitome from a lower base using the Tensor cores on Nvidia's RTX GPUs. Previously, nosotros've constitute that the performance and image quality that DLSS achieves is roughly equivalent to resolution downsampling in the 60 to 75 pct resolution scale range, around 1800p.

Here we accept Battlefield V and we've lined up a side-by-side comparing with the game running at 4K native resolution, 4K DLSS, and a 78% resolution scale of 4K – delivering around the aforementioned performance every bit DLSS – then sharpened with both the new Freestyle filter, and Radeon Image Sharpening.

To me at that place is no doubt whatsoever that the resolution scaled + sharpened image -- using either Freestyle or RIS which are most identical -- delivers a much ameliorate presentation than DLSS.

In this game, DLSS is very blurry and miles backside the native 4K image, whereas the resolution scaled then sharpened image gets pretty close to native, if a little backside in super-fine particular. In this game, nosotros simply don't see why you'd use DLSS.

In that location are better DLSS implementations, for example Metro Exodus. Simply again, the downsampled to 0.7x prototype, which is then sharpened, preserves more detail and avoids the oil painting result we don't similar about the DLSS image. Here, the sharpened version gets very close to the native 4K presentation, whereas DLSS looks a bit weird, which is an artefact of its deep learning reconstruction technique.

If you zoom into some of the areas like rocks or grass with lots of fine item, the differences are highlighted. While DLSS does a decent job with larger items similar close textures, information technology's in these fine elements where we notice the sharpened image preserves a more realistic detail.

But What About Performance?

The adjacent step is to expect at performance. We had previously found with Radeon Image Sharpening testing The Division 2, that enabling this feature resulted in a negligible performance bear on on Navi GPUs. The same can't be said for Nvidia's implementation on the RTX 2070. However, the new Freestyle filter is a noticeable improvement over the old mode.

Where the older Freestyle filter tanked performance, dropping the average frame rate in this game by 12 percent, the new filter is more manageable. A half-dozen percent drop, which is exactly half the bear upon as Nvidia stated it would be, is much meliorate and turns out to only exist a few FPS in most cases. The impact is also very similar to the Reshade port of AMD's CAS algorithm, which as we saw previously resulted in a four per centum drop to framerates in this title.

What'south very interesting to see, besides, is the operation comparing when resolution downsampling. Hither's Metro Exodus running at a 0.7x shader calibration, plus the results for 4K DLSS. In this game, the new FreeStyle filter had a small 4% performance impact, matching DLSS. Conversely, the old filter had a more than pronounced 13% performance drib which is the kind of bear upon you lot'll experience in gameplay.

In our opinion these results show that DLSS is dead in the water. With Nvidia's previous Freestyle filter, there was a reason to use DLSS in a game like Metro Exodus. The visual quality was decent plenty and it didn't come up with the performance impact of older Freestyle sharpening. Just now, with the new Freestyle filter performing equivalently to DLSS for what is in our stance noticeably ameliorate visual quality, we don't encounter any reason to opt for DLSS as your performance enhancing option. Besides remember, DLSS has to be supported by every game, whereas Freestyle is supported in hundreds of titles.

This is further illustrated in our Battlefield V results. Nosotros see a ~two.5% performance drib using the new Freestyle filter with a 78% resolution calibration. DLSS performs a bit better, actually outperforming the not-sharpened 78% scaled image. But every bit yous will take seen earlier, the paradigm quality difference is enormous between the ii. The sharpened presentation blows information technology out of the water. We'd happily sacrifice a few frames to get the much sharper image from the not-DLSS method.

Bottom Line

Overall we retrieve this situation is really interesting. AMD introducing RIS may have forced Nvidia to human action in updating their sharpening filter available through Freestyle. In the process, they have created a improve solution than DLSS which was advertised every bit a central selling point for RTX graphics cards. Big win for gamers.

Competition in these areas means more innovation and better solutions for PC gamers everywhere. The new Nvidia Freestyle feature is much ameliorate than what came earlier, and on top of that Nvidia owners now get their own ultra low latency manner and other improvements similar 30-bit color back up, all driven by competition. Then Nvidia has fired its own shot back with integer scaling -- though Intel was beginning to back up information technology on their integrated graphics -- so it'due south at present up to AMD to respond.

Digging deeper into image sharpening, we think Nvidia has the better solution overall when compared to RIS. Freestyle can attain equivalent image quality, just it too offers an adjustable strength slider which is great for games like The Division 2 that are a bit overprocessed with default settings. You can also configure it on a game-by-game footing.

Nvidia's solution is also much more than compatible. Information technology works with all Nvidia GPUs, and supports all modern APIs including DX11. Currently, Radeon Paradigm Sharpening is exclusive to Navi GPUs and doesn't support DX11. While RIS has the advantage of a lower performance impact on Navi, restricting information technology to newer GPUs and not supporting DX11 doesn't make a lot of sense.

In that location is still room for comeback though. Nvidia's whitelist of Freestyle games is large simply not comprehensive. Games we previously tested similar Hitman 2 and Resident Evil ii are non on the list, and they're fairly major titles released in the last twelvemonth. We'd really like to meet support opened up for all games, even if it'south a "beta" or "unsupported" toggle.

Does this mean Nvidia should kill DLSS entirely? Hard to advise they would practice and so, but we're certain that for enthusiasts reading this kind of coverage, you know that using resolution downsampling plus Nvidia'south Freestyle sharpening filter is the all-time option, effectively killing DLSS if you know what you're doing.

DLSS has the advantage of beingness a simple, one-click button which may be a corking solution for mainstream gamers. Perhaps if the DLSS would exist replaced with a one-click pick for sub-native rendering plus sharpening, it would deliver better results and be open to more GPUs, non just RTX. Although one of the reasons you lot want to downsample is to get an actress performance boost for ultra loftier resolution gaming or when enabling other taxing features, such as ray tracing. Certainly looking forrard to encounter how gamers utilize these features in the coming months and what become preferred methods for optimizing operation.