Is Native Resolution Always the Best Image Quality? | GeForce Fact or Fiction 

Here is another example that didn't make this video cut. Here is DLSS (Quality) vs Native (No TAA) in Trepang2 at 1440P. 🙂 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-2qaWV_bbNBw.html

Remember: this is EXTREMELY biased to make you buy Nvidia.

Devs and hardware manufacturers will not stop until they’ve completely ruined image quality and everything becomes a blurry mess. TAA is very blurry, especially in motion, and dlaa while better can still be blurry too at distances. Native resolution with multiple AA options besides those two methods should always be available.

Now i get why PC requirements for new games get more ridiculous by the day, they no longer optimize performance for native resolution.

Image stability isn't everything. You stabilize it, but *obliterate* image clarity in the process.

I've started replaying a lot of older games from 2005-2015 and it's quite astonishing how sharp and defined they are (especially obvious in motion) because they don't use temporal solutions to fix aliasing. Once you go back to modern titles which pretty much always implement DLSS, FSR or any other form of temporal anti-aliasing it's even more obvious. I'm not saying these technologies are bad, but I wish developers offered us the option to use other forms of AA for those that prefer it such as in Horizon Forbidden West which allows SMAA.

Temporal solutions and TAA are the plague of modern gaming and image clarity stop using it!

At 1:52 you can CLEARLY see that native has more detail. Comparisons of DLSS always use stationary camera which allows it to resolve a good looking image but in motion (something you do 99% of the time while playing a game) it blurs the hell out of everything.

TLDR: yes it is. But Nvidia will fire me if I say it. You're welcome 👍🏻

If i move my camera and everything blurs - it's bad

Downsampling from higher than native resolution results in best possible picture quality

This is the biggest gas lighting video on rendering that I've ever seen.

static image maybe yes, do it with something in motion. You will see native always preserved better image quality

Bad thing, is that you've opened pandora's box with your upscaling and frame gen. And now game developers will become lazy optimizing their games, making FG and DLSS mandatory for 60 fps

No one is complaining about DLSS being a great option, we just don't want to see it as the 'solution' for poorly optimized games. Developers shouldn't be relying on DLSS (and FG) to hit target framerates.

False advertising. You should be prosecuted.

One major problem I have with DLSS is that its just TAA with AI slapped on top of it. It has all the same limitations and downside like smearing foliage and motion blur. So you guys mostly comparing DLSS to TAA is disingenuous, since they both have the same flaws but NVIDIA's has better quality people can't see all the other downsides it has since you're essentially comparing it to itself in a way. Comparing it to SMAA would've exposed a lot of flaws and limitations in DLAA, and also the lack of motion comparisons is another thing that makes this video disingenuous. I see when using NMS you compared it to no AA at all (not as good as SMAA but fine) but once again, zero motion. So you just show a more stable image that looks better but are deliberately hiding all the motion issues DLSS/DLAA excudes even on light camera pans.

this video is basically saying 2+2=5 which is fucking crazy to me. How on earth a technology company could be such an enemy of the truth or able to or even want to lie to their audience and want to manipulate them in such a obvious and evil way?

This video is fiction. Native resolution is always superior to an upscaled resolution in like for like scenarios. Comparing TAA native to DLSS quality is not like for like and is a dishonest way to look at this. The proper comparison to answer the stated question is "does DLSS quality look as good as DLAA" and the answer is no. Because native resolution always looks better than upscaling in any like for like comparison. Showing that DLSS is better than TAA is not the same thing as showing that upscaling is better than native resolution.

Look at an elevator door in Cyberpunk, then get back to me.

Quite a bit of detail is lost at 1:52, just look at the reflection

In my opinion, this video is pure manipulation. In shown examples, they used too big monitors for native 1440p and 1080p, so that games wouldn't look good at native resolutions because of low pixel density. For example games on 32' monitor at native 1080p will just not look good cuz of low pixel density. But games on 32' monitor at native 4k will look a lot better then upscaled 1080p or 1440p. Just don't buy too big monitor for you preferred resolution.

Not fiction, a fact. Native is always better. DLAA is almost always better than TAA aswell. If you have an RTX card, DLAA is your native point of comparison, not TAA. In DLAA/SS supported games, TAA is obsolete if you have those cards. And that's where upscaled image quality loses to native. Doesn't matter if DLSS in some cases looks better than TAA, it doesn't look better than DLAA. Ever. The video hinted at this, but they love to market DLSS so they make the comparison to TAA anyway, and call falsely DLSS "better than native"

DLDSR : "Am I a joke to you ?"

DLSS IS LITERALLY JUST LOWERING THE RESOLUTION THEY DONT WANT YOU TO KNOW THISS GAMERS RISE UP

that grin on his face tells us Frame Generation 2.0 is coming to GeForce 50 series

screenshots, non motion look good, its once you move, it turns to a smeary blurry mess

this video teaches us two things, 1) game devs are lazier than ever to optimize their titles which leads to 2) you need a new graphics card which will render the game at a lower resolution to make it playable then upscale it back to make you think DLSS is better than native.

Reading all these scathing comments... it's incredible. I got SO frustrated recently with having to choose between a clear sharp image and dealing with "incessant" aliasing in new games. Stuff I absolutely DID NOT NEED TO DO back when MSAA was the "go to" for anti aliasing. Sure there are limitations and what not but it's nice to see that there a lot of people who still value image and motion clarity. Playing older games at very high refresh is awesome!

TAA and the over reliance on it is so widespread that people have forgotten how clear and stable games used to look like, that videos like this and Digital foundry's can gaslight people into thinking that DLSS/DLAA are now better than a properly rendered image, or in DF's BS argument that "games need TAA to achieve higher graphics" when it's in fact just the result of extreme unoptimization, which is now getting exacerbated further through DLSS/FSR/etc and the premature push for ray tracing.

By your claims, native resolution + DLAA as the AA solution, is the best quality, which is still native resolution... so yes?

Misleading... marketing BS coming from someone with a 4k monitor and a 3090 If you remove the DLAA portion of DLSS then native TAA looks superior to DLSS ALWAYS in any game that was not trained into the driver and is running in dumb mode not reference mode For the best image quality possible you do native + DLAA

Temporal stability is extremely important and that's something TAA and DLSS can't keep, a single image may look good with DLSS but even if the game is static you will notice that pixels from the past frame won't be exactly the same as in the next frame causing a blurry image, and that is worse as you move the camera. AI upscaling is snake oil to solve a problem that could be solved by precise means

"Hey guys, here's some incredibly cherrypicked examples of two games we could find where you can still turn antialiasing off altogether, and found a number of edge-cases within where DLSS is subjectively more pleasing-looking than a native frame!" MYTH: BUSTED AF M8

Hello nVidia, All DLSS do a good job but you forgot to mention that they can introduce some ghosting 😀

Were your native examples running zero AA? Bit of an unfair comparison. At 1080P, which a lot of people game at, DLSS doesnt have enough data to work with to surpass the quality of native + good AA. However the framerate benefit usually makes it favorable.

DLSS is nice for budget gamers and looks better than FSR easily. It is not nice when game devs think it should be required for playable framerates on mid-higher end cards. Now we are seeing games system requirements show FG needed for 60fps. Why optimize when there is (get ready for buzzword) AI !!!!!!

I don't know if you guys at NVidia know this, but when people play games they usually tend to actually move the camera and the character around which looks unacceptably blurry with upscaling. Stop murdering visuals with temporal "solutions".

Frame Generation and DLSS is everything that's wrong with modern gaming: Nvidia is shoving it down our throats constantly because they damn well know game developers use those 2 technologies as an excuse to not optimize their games, while nvidia can sell you underwhelmingly slow gpu's for 1.5x or 2x the price. We seriously need to talk about it and open our eyes to what modern gaming is becoming.

No comparisons in motion? interesting. Why don't you do a comparison of where the character doesn't stand still?

DRS is the Best thing made for Playing old Games

Not talking about DLDSR is crazy

Why does it look like they are trying to convince us that DLSS and Frame Generation are better than native resolution? 😨

From what I can see at 1:45 DLSS indeed makes the dome's surface appear smoother, but the AI is not able to correctly display the reflected buildings in it. They appear to be stacked squares, so a lot of details are lost

1:49 with DLSS the flying birds have trailing artifacts. This is typical of DLSS where small objects tend to ghost and leave trails, and is left unaddressed for years.

dlaa can do it on native resolution, so we dont need dlss active

Lol almost all upscalers look good when camera is still, as soon as you begin to move whole image gets blurry. DLSS/FSR/XeSS or upscalers in general will never be better than Native until they fix these problems.

Native is always better, especially in motion. DLSS looks better when there's no motion, but the blur from it during movement kills subpixel detail.

DLDSR + DLSS my beloved

1:36 What's the point of comparing static images? Now move around and everything on "DLSS Quality" becomes blurry.

DLSS/DLAA simply replaces TAA as a better Anti-Aliasing solution. Higher resolution will still always be better for image quality. Games used to include a resolution scale from, for example 50% to 200%. Why can't we have that with DLSS?

Yes. Native Resolution is ALWAYS the best image quality Mr. Freeman. We know this. Let’s not market a tech vs. telling the truth.

DLDSR + DLSS is Black Magic

"they continually get better and smarter" only if you buy one of their newest GPUs every generation :)

to be honest dlss is very good when you standing still, but when you walk or move the camera there's noticable smearing and graphic ghosting...

1:44 DLSS also lowered the resolution of the cubemaps and made the geometry blobs lmao

The company trying to gas light you into buying the more expensive yet inferior product😂 "Trust us guys" gtfo

DLSS is NOT AA, stop mixing them up. Also, it unclear how it used here. Is the rendering resolution for both native/TAA and DLSS sides the same, so DLSS is used to upscale to a higher than native resolution, which is then resampled back to the rendering resolution; similarly to SSAA ? Or is the DLSS side rendered at a lower rendering resolution, then upscaled via DLSS to the same resolution as the native side ? In the case of the later, the picture will NEVER be more "detailled" or even as detailled as native resolution rendering. It might look less aliased, but that's because it has been blurred to death.

Nice try Diddy

and let's don't forget there is also DLDSR 2.25x (50% smoothness) which is even better than DLAA.

Dlss is too blurry in motion even at the best quality. Even in standstill I still feel compelled to have a sharpness filter compared to native which kinda dunks on the whole IQ aspect

I grew up on a ZX Spectrum, so DLAA and Ray-Tracing is a bit overkill for my needs,, but fascinating anyway. 😁

This Video in short: "please buy our overpriced RTX GPUs!"

Sometimes games have poor smugdy image natively and dlss introduces a better alternative with it. It does however make things a bit blurrier which can be good or a bad thing

I actally prefer DLSS sometimes. Other times DLAA. Depends on the game, type of game, if you want image stability or sharpness etc etc

1:45 The cubemap inside the DLSS shot is a mosaic compared to the native version

Is this an excuse for 4090 not doing 60 at 4k even if it costs absurdly, preparing suckers for 5090.

Fictional frames and fictional pixels. Brought to you by nVIDIA.

1:49 - Your upscaler has decreased the cubemap reflection quality. Sort that issue, and maybe DLSS can be perfect since it constantly conflicts with volumetrics and fog and planar reflections and the like. Have a look at mirrors in The Last of Us Part I and you'll see what I mean.

Downsampling from higher resolution thab native resolution results in better image quality but use more VRAM. It would be great if all Nvidia card doesn't either suck in raster or lack of VRAM. Conclusion: Native will usually be better.

To me, DLAA for a very minor performance cost over native and DLDSR for a modest, but noticeable performance cost has by far been the best image quality I have seen.

hear me out, input latency and ghosting in movement.

The most important factor is how it feels while playing, but ultimately that's up to the developers.

Native Resolution for the win ! DLSS should be used if you can't achieve high fps anymore !

As usual every example only shows static shots, you know people move the camera when playing video games right?

Gaslighting: the video.

I'll stop you right there. Yes, native res. always better! After getting 4090 I thought it will be enoght to run most games natively in 4K and this is true, but for some games to reach at least 60 you have to use DLSS or FSR. I've tested a lot of games to see how they change the overall quality and this is really bad I hated it, like in Wukong or Alan Wake 2 tough games to run in 4k Ultra settings. It blurs the image a lot. In every game, I tested I didn't like or didn't want to turn on DLSS not because some windows at the distance became less shimmering but most importantly image quality overall. I hope RTX 5090 will get me 60fps in 4k!!! without any DLSS or FSR

Comparing native with incompetent TAA implementation to DLSS or DLAA is kind of misleading. Also still image comparisons are next to worthless because that's not how games are played outside of maybe admiring something for a few seconds during many minutes of motion only gameplay. A much better comparison would be to stand still and have the camera cicling and use 2 very comparable frames to have a more valuable comparison.

Native Resolution will always be best

DLDSR with 15% sharpness looks insane, i just want nvidia to add more options so we can go over 2.25x resolution. DLSS + Native = looks blurry if you don't use any sharpening, the best is from reshade - marty mcfly - it costs 3fps but makes image so clean and clear it feels like its 4K.

I found turning off any DLSS features on FF16 PC massively improved image quality when paired with my Sony TV. Beforehand, I got a ton of what appeared to be screen tearing, so i spent a lot of time messing with my refresh rate, and frame cap to avoid exceeding my 120hz tv. Didn't think I would reach that when playing on 4K Ultra settings with a game that's apparently not so optimised, but there you go. After turning off all DLSS features, I noticed a far fewer artifacts, basically none, on castle walls and other repetitive textured areas. That's where DLSS comes falls short for me. Those little artifacts are too hard for me to ignore, and I honestly hope we reach a point where devs continue to push themselves to improve their coding and optimizations and that GPU devs can continue to make tools that give us what we've always wanted. MORE PIXELS, AND FASTER! :P also, please start making a mobile chipset for steam deck 2 or other handhelds. I'll take all the DLSS and frame gen on those devices.

Bruh The marketing bs going crazy Dlss is good but not better than native if the game has good aa and not a taa solution that just blurs the entire image

Мне конечно очень нравится dlss и того же мнения, что и в этом ролике, но когда говорят, что dlss показывает детали лучше 1:47 чем taa. Вы сами же показываете, что с dlss отражения становятся кубиками какими-то, а не реальными отражениями с кучей мелких деталей, там чуть ли не окна видно в каждом из зданий, а с dlss просто какой-то майнкрафт..

"Even though I was already familiar with these 'techniques,' I found the video extremely clear and interesting. Well done!"

Interesting that Nvidia made a 3 and a half minute video to convince us that native resolution is somehow *not* better than the guessing their technology does, while talking about a bunch of things that have nothing to do with the *resolution* of the rendered image.

Funny thing about video games, the picture is almost always in motion. Whether you move the camera or the character. That's kind of the entire point of video games - moving stuff. Temporal solutions can look better than native resolution ONLY in static pictures or scenes where there's very little movement. Which is almost never in games.

native resolution will always be king, 1:1 will always be the best scale. You think I will listen to a shill video from NVIDIA? DLSS and up scaling in general has done nothing but cause laziness in optimization.

DLAA is a great tech but can come at a cost lots of times in terms of FPS. Also important to remember is the fact the games are played in constant motion and DLSS will introduce artifacts in motion compared to the Native image with some AA. Still shots don't tell the whole story of image quality. We play games not sit and look in the corner of the level. DLSS is a great tech but it always annoys me how they act like its a zero trade off solution that makes your games look better while also improving FPS. 1080p should pretty much never use DLSS due to its already lower pixel count. DLSS with 1080p will introduce awful shimmering and artifacting in motion. 1440p should never use DLSS below quality for the same reason. The only real use for DLSS is 4k because at that point they have enough pixels to work with even at the lower DLSS settings to make an ok image. Its getting embarrassing how they are acting like people shouldn't use native rendering anymore. Like have yall seen the consoles using FSR and such? looks horrid in most titles. Both of those star wars games look like shit. But they have to use it to resolve sub pixel detail that would be missing at lower native resolutions. What is happening here folks is we are getting way too far ahead of ourselves and outpacing our hardware with tech in games. How many people can really truly run games that use RT for all lighting? I mean the consoles are over here running games at 720p with FSR to upscale to 4k. Not everyone spends thousands on a PC and yet devs are developing all their games as if everyone in the world has a system that can handle full path tracing at a decent enough res to be presentable.

The best image quality is DSR + DLSS.

Dear Nvidia and game devs, please normalize DLAA, not DLSS. 90% of gamers do not play on 4k

0:26 Yeah just enable max anti aliasing, because when you enable DLSS they include anti aliasing.

A lot of games running at a native resolution with the best anti-aliasing setting (probably TAA) can be less "stable", meaning more stair-stepping and crawling artifacts around geometry. Using an AI/Temporal upscaler can sometimes produce fewer artifacts than a native resolution can, but it will vary between which games actually benefit. When I play games that support DLSS 2/FSR 2 or better, I tend to push all settings as high as I can and then use these upscalers to target my framerate. Using DLSS 2 or FSR 2 can also compliment your anti-aliasing technique, even if you don't want better performance. AI/Temporal upscalers are amazing. They have multiple use cases. Frame Generation on the other hand...is not good enough yet.

it really depends on your resolution. At 4k, native is a waste of gpu resources, at 1080p sure and at 1440p...it really depends on how good the AA solution of a game is. There been a lot of misinformation spread by people who don't even own 4k displays on this very topic.

On 4k you don't even need AA, DLSS is good if you need performance but on 1080p AA is must

No, DLAA isn't the best option here. DLDSR is (for straight up image quality). Or DLSS+DLDSR for better performance and image quality than DLAA.

"They continually get better and smarter" If you always buy the last generation card*

You say that native isn't the best quality, but then push DLAA, which is native resolution. Also no mention of supersampling which is better quality than both DLSS and DLAA. You draw the conclusion that sub-native is better quality, when the reality is that higher than native is better quality. Also the comparisons are only in still shots, the downsides of DLSS/DLAA/TAA become visible in motion. This feels intentionally misleading. This is just marketing disguised as an informative video.

z-fighting in in 0:40 is not a image quality problem that is solved by AA no matter what anti-aliasing method is chosen and distinct from aliasing

Non native distorts the natural perspective between things, which takes away from depth immersion and causes visual fatigue/confusion.

Let's not beat around the bush. People use DLSS to gain performance. If extra performance is not needed, most will certainly use native settings (or DLAA) to retain overall image quality. You can cherry pick both ways all day but that is the fact.