What CS:GO is meant to look like 

"And if you see SS and think it sounds familiar for some reason..." As a German I was sweating for a second there

15:45 Damn, DLDSR added an entire gun to the image. Amazing to see, how far technology has come.

Thank you for secretly releasing probably the most easily understandable guide to AA in graphics and how to parse them for actual tangible results and not data on a spreadsheet.

Why the hell am I watching this? I own a laptop with integrated graphics.

The editing in this video is so subtly incredible. The bent pins on the CPU and never ending GPU killed me. Well done Philip. Really a masterclass in sneaking jokes and fun details into the video.

at this point in my life 90% of the information i know Ai upscaling and graphics cards is from philip

6:20 so many germans have sweat during this video

Me watching this video on my phone in portrait mode at 480p : 🧐 "yes, I see what you mean"

More people need to see that bottleneck graph section. My god it's irritating how many people treat bottlenecking like it's literally Satan himself, when the reality is your system is pretty much bottlenecking most of the time, and it just depends on what you're doing/playing.

I just enabled it and WEW it's like iv'e upgraded my 1080p 144hz monitor to 1440p without spending £400

Having read about AA over the last 20 years, this is the best overview video of the current tech. The only thing missing is talking about the effect on moving objects (image stability)

One thing to note about the "sweet spot" is GPU latency. When approaching 100% GPU usage, the GPU gets a bit clumsy and input latency goes up. So even though the sweet spot has the same FPS, it's actually a less responsive experience that can have a negative impact on your skills in a competitive game.

I can tell you've put a lot of thought in making your explanations easy to understand for everyone, seriously well done

I never get a chance to post a comment so early. So I'm going to use this moment to say I really appreciate all your work Phil. I don't even play CS:GO anymore, but I'll still watch your videos for their informative and well presented design 😌

Tried to explain this to my friend and he called me a looney conspiracy theorist. He was an IT specialist with experience in game development, goes to show a degree doesn't give you intelligence. (CPU/GPU limited part)

thanks now i'll watch all the videos in 4k on my 1080p screen.. it does actually look better and i dind't expect it to

Been running above native res for a long time. I do wish LCDs could act like CRTs where display resolution didn't matter, though. Fancy upscaling wasn't ever necessary on CRTs because most resolutions looked equally as "good" in terms of how the display handled it.

4k isn't showing up so I'm assuming the video is still processing

Not just educational but very humorous. Well done

1:25 Ah yes HL2 in 8K also me: plays in 480p

3:52 Philip, I need you to NOT make me think I suddenly have a slew of stuck pixels on a brand new monitor.

3:52 You scared the shit out of me with that stuck pixel. Job well done. Congratulations.

Me watching this video is 240p: yup, i see the pixels.

One of my favourite things in Titanfall 2 was the addition of dynamic temporal super sampling based on gpu load and frametimes and I still wonder why more games dont add such an amazing feature

I always tought that downsampling was great, but this video really opened my eyes to all the possibilities. My old games will look absolutely stunning

I like how the CPU at 9:48 has a ton of bent pins

Down sampling is also used in many high end video cameras to create beautiful video, even at lower resolutions. It works really well

I don't do a lot of gaming but I make digital drawings; when I make an illustration that is meant to be in 1080p, I still make the canvas in 8K and then export it in 1080p because I thought it looked nicer. Glad to see I am not crazy

I clicked on the 1080p quality option and it turned your video into a slide show. Such an amazing contrast! I suddenly had time to really appreciate every single one of frames, it really improved my enjoyment of this content :D

11:08 a few people have done some fairly scientific latency testing in a number of games and generally found the best performance when GPU load is kept to around 80% or below; above 80%, latency tends to go up faster than FPS goes down. ensuring that the GPU does not spend a lot of time at or above 80% will also greatly improve noise and thermals.

I make use of the downsampling effect for JPEG images too. I realized that when targeting the same image file size it is better to a) use a higher image resolution with lower quality than a b) smaller resolution with higher quality, because the scaling algorithms when presenting the image on a viewport smaller then the image, usually yields better results for B. Only recently I discovered that A can have better results when using a sharpening filter prior saving.

The thing that got me to appreciate just how good downscaling can be is vr. I upgraded the hell out of my pc so it could handle vr, I went overboard and can now play vr games at 1.9x the internal resolution of the headset. If you've got the extra frames above your refresh rate to spare then definitely try squeezing some more quality out

The amount of work you put in your videos is as amazing as always. Glad to hear the old MVP anthem for the sponsor though, can't wait for the next case opening millionaire episode and valve adding your music kit.

I wish I would've had this information and my current pc 10 years ago, better late than never! Stopped playing CS a long time ago, but I still watch your content for entertainment purpose, your videos are so well thought, you never fail to disappoint.

So much research and effort in one video. It's great to see people being excited about such niche things. My favorite video of yours so far man, keep up the good work!

The thing is that what you seem to be looking for is simply texture multisampling. Supersampling is pretty much considered a sin for real-time renderers. Instead, anisotropic filtering does exactly what you are looking for and really really well. But devs usually implement the alpha part the cheap way: using thresholding no need to mess with blending fragments in the correct order. This obviously results in aliasing near these texture holes. Now by ray-tracing the primitives containing transparent parts on top of the opaque (rasterized) ones, we obtain the same level of quality of supersampling (texture-wise) for much, much cheaper. Ray-tracing is quite a fancy & easy solution to alpha blending. There is some rewrite potential of these parts of legacy renderers, but gamers need to actively ask for it. The superior stage is shader multisampling altogether which, well, is pretty much indistinguishable from supersampling. There is some work done on locally increasing the sample count but at the end of the day, this is really similar to running the same shader code multiple times per pixel.

6:19 Those two letters don't bring good correlations to a Polish person like me 😅

there isnt even 1440p quality yet

WOW! How did I not know this? The image quality looked much better. Like running a game at native. Thank you! YT vids look better now. I suppose I should have known though. It's the same principle as recording and mixing audio at a higher bit depth and rate only to down sample the master. I also want to add that one reason for going with lower quality graphics in FPSs is to reduce the amount of distractions.

Every time I watch one of your videos, I just think of the old days on CS:CZ and CS:S. 10 odd years now. Great to see you're still around and hey! 1m+ subs now! Congratulations!

the 4k version isn't out yet :(

CSAA was actually a more optimized format of MSAA where it stored a reduced amount of color samples, compared to coverage (coverage being which color sample is affecting the pixel how much), so you could have much smoother edges, and even though it could only have like 4 color samples max on 16x CSAA for example (I dont remember the exact number unfortunately), it yielded performance comparable to MSAA 8x. Unfortunately support was dropped when the Pascal architecture on NVIDIA came around (GTX 1080 Ti included). I remember playing around with CSAA in half life 2 then being confused at why the option was gone when I got my 1080 Ti :(

3:08 the graphics are so good, I didn't even noticed that this was Arma

I remember sometime in 2007, when I got my first OLED -screen phone (Benq-Siemens S88) and when I tried to make some custom background images for it, they looked horrific when they were matched to the screen resolution. Then I tried them at a higher resolution, like 2x or 4x and they looked really smooth. Haven't thought much of it afterwards.

I really appreciate these long, well explained, well edited, and well written videos. This one in particular I think is such a quality video. I never really knew what bottlenecking was too, so your explanation really helped me finally understand it. Thanks for the great lunchtime video!

7:21 I didn't expect this joke so soon, as a result I am on the floor.

The red stars that disappear at lower resolutions at 3:57 is probably one of the coolest things ive seen on youtube. Nice one

Very good video. I've always known that watching a RU-vid video, for instance, in 4k on a 1080p screen will look much better than watching it at 1080p, but I hadn't realised quite how much of a difference it could make until I watched this video. The same goes for running CS:GO at a higher resolution than your native screen too, although with that being said I play on 1280x1024 stretched lol.

I have also noticed that DLDSR also helps get rid of shimmering effects as well. I have been sort of using it as an alternative to TAA in some games where it is super blurry and has ghosting.

ive been playing dead space 2 on pc again and the AA method used back in 2011 is terrible and forcing it in the control panel just hits the frames way too hard, I ended up just enabling super resolution and im rendering the game at 4k and downscaling to 1080p, it doesn't look as crisp as forcing 8x MSAA but it looks much better than native and still holds 165fps.

19:20 at this point, I'll adding a bit of informations here: The tree becomes more solid at longer distance because that's how the shader in game works with mipmap. Lower mipmap (lower alpha mask for the leaves is the same way as lowering resolution of the texture map) in result the alpha mask will become more solid and can't see through. This works on every games, even now we always have to use mipmap to save resource from afar. This plus the LoD of the mesh and the resolution give this kind of blocky mess. Good video btw

All i can think of is the video you did on settings years ago and it's making me feel old. Great video with good depth on all you're talking about!

testing my settings was hell of a journey as my game crashed every single time I changed the resolution, aswell as sometimes i changes MSAA settings. I don't have a potato pc tho

It's pretty neat how these donsampled and zoomed-in images look just like some old pre-rendered backdrop from games like Myst.

5:42 the detail!

I had an entire blog dedicated to high quality screenshots from games I've taken and they were all done with downsampling :) There used to be a great pc screenshot thread on neogaf with tons of amazing quality screenshots doing the same. Some people even mod old ass games to force support for like 8k resolutions on games from the 90s and get beautiful screenshots that nobody else can get unless they do they same. I actually love it so much. Very highly suggest taking a lil sightseeing tour through Karnaca in Dishonored 2 while downsampling to the maximum of your computers abilities.

I imagine what DLDSR is doing is rendering at the resolution they claim it's rendering at, upscaling using their AI magic to the resolution they say it "looks like", and then downsampling back to your monitor's resolution.

I've been playing old games regularly at 8k on my 4k monitor just for the absolute lack of aliasing of any kind , it looks phenomenal.

I think the future is in combining: downscaling in geometry and textures, upscaling for raytracing, ssao and so on. Also 4k and 5k displays will solve this problem, running in native resolution.

This was interesting and educational. That said, it does seem only really relevant/useful for people still on 1080p monitors, or maybe 1440p. I have a 4K monitor and can't see myself ever using this since downscaling from 8K just seems impractical for current GPU's even if you wanted to - 4K is already hard enough. Might be relevant in the future though.

This video is very well made and I feel like I could probably play around with this on my system but I'm honestly afraid of changing stuff in my nvidia control panel and then forgetting what I changed if I need to change it back for something else that I'm doing. I'm a game developer so performance testing on my machine is super important and forgetting a small detail like having a certain nvidia feature enabled that could impact performance in a way that I don't expect could cause me to end up wasting time on trying to fix an issue that it's causing. It just seems like a hassle to deal with when going between different games/work.

How long did this take to make? I'm lost for words with the quality of this video

you are missing Supersample, it will apply that 8x MSAA to textures with alpha too, it can be force in the nvidia control panel, some games will be compatible like Fallout 3 (and in general older APIs than DX10)

I loved this video. Fwiw the big problem with aliasing for me is when the camera moves and the aliasing artifacts make it look like something is moving when it's not, which is really bad in competitive games. Or worse, leaves in the distance moving causing a flashing artifact.

I use downscaling a lot. Just makes the image look sharper and I have a ton of performace unused bc I have a 3060ti and a 1080p monitor.

the section at 8:00 got me all bricked up edit: nah this whole video is sick as fuck. way more interesting than the upscaling IMO

this answered alot of background questions in my mind. thanks!

What splits everyone's views on whether or not upscaling or downscaling matters is due to how people care about their gameplay experience. for example, if someone cares more about the story, they wouldnt care as much about how fast the screen goes if they care about the gameplay, they would want a good image either way, everyone has their own way of wanting to experience a game. No need to argue with someone that they should experience what you experience

Even if framerate is ultimately equal, a lower res frame can be rendered more quickly than a higher res one, so you'll get lower latency. Sure, your GPU will we sitting around, waiting for instructions from the CPU half the time, but whenever they do arrive, it will have the job completed ever-so-slightly earlier than otherwise.

I'm not sure why but this video is endlessly rewatchable and I love it. Would be very interested in seeing you SS more games to reveal "hidden details".

I’ve used the higher resolution then my monitor for RU-vid videos. It really helps you see when the RU-vid compression attacks darker scenes

Wow, I actually came to a similar conclusion when messing around with TF2 on a 750Ti a few years ago. It was very strange, because running the game at 4k actually INCREASED the average FPS (CPU was a 4790K@4GHz) because the game just didn't increase the GPU's clock because TF2 hardly uses modern GPUs. Only problem is the old Source menus shrank with the higher res. So it was quite difficult to change options or use the dev console.

Wow, this explains why I always had the impression that watching videos in 4k DOES look better on my 1440p monitor than watching them in 1440p. I always thought this has to be a placebo effect, though, so it's nice to know it's real.

GREAT VIDEO-AA & MSAA & FSAA makes me remember in the beginning when enabling it any game was struggling to run......forward to 2022 you feel nothing if you enable it.....same story repeats now with DLSS & Raytracing.....in 20 years from now it will be just a feature by default :)

11:20 that's a really concise explanation as to how bottlenecks work, nice job

It’s insane how all these terms like anti aliasing that see every day and had no clue what meant were explained so easily

This was the best downsampling (or downscaling) video I've seen yet. I especially liked the Nice Tree 1 bit; you really showed that DLDSR is NOT getting more detail than the resolution it's based off. I didn't know if DLDSR got more detail and I didn't think of testing it like this. Super cool! What do you think of downsampling (eg. 1.78x DLDSR) then downscaling (eg. 80% resolution scale) to get better image quality and not as significant of a performance impact as 1.78x DLDSR? I tried this exact thing in Hunt Showdown but found that the image was actually MORE JAGGY with the aforementioned scaling soup than native 1080p. I wonder why this is so 🤔... I'd expect the opposite as the net resolution is still higher than 1080p.

I used 4K DSR for years when playing on a 1080p monitor. Downsampling is a far better method of AA than even MSAA. More pixels = better.

I finally get how this works. It's not anti-aliasing so much as it's saying "see that palm tree? It's only rendering at 320x240", but your display is capable of showing more pixels of detail at that location, so downsampling allows you to get more information out of a lower resolution base. Running a game at 1080p isn't actually 1080p for every object on screen. But running at 4K downsampled means all the smaller elements on screen that lost detail in the renderer get that detail back.

never stop talking about upscaling, it's fascinating I love it !

Few things, MSAA can affect foliage if it the alpha cutouts are forwarded to its coverage and also theres a reason textures also look better on higher res and that is because the Mipmaps are biased against the higher res.

Okay, here's a quick history of AntiAliasing. In the beginning, there was AA. This was produced by rendering to a buffer that was several (2x or 4x) times greater in size then the native display resolution, then downscaling it to native. It was horribly inefficient, and took twice (or four times) as much work as rendering natively, but it looked fantastic. Then came "Multisampling AA". This worked by rendering at native resolution, then mixing in small parts of surrounding pixels into each pixel to smooth jaggies. It worked, and was highly efficient as it was only rendering at native resolution, but it made everything blurry, and couldn't add back in pixels that were lost when they were rendered. As companies played with it, different sampling patterns came about (including Quincunx - 5 pixels in a diamond pattern, the most simple sampling you could get), with different numbers of pixels averaged. Original AA was still around at this time, and was renamed "Super-Sampling AA". Then Matrox came out with a fantastic system called "Edge AA". This rendered at native for the whole scene, then used the depth buffer to detect edges of objects and re-render them with SSAA (up to 16x!). Because it was only working on the edges, it wasn't as intensive as full screen SSAA, and it didn't make everything blurry like MSAA. It didn't work on objects with alpha channels, like chainlink fences and leaves for example, but where it did work, the effect was astounding. All the 3D companies copied this and put it into their MSAA engines for improved speed and visual fidelity (leaving flat textures largely unblurred). Next, NVidia worked out that if you ran an edge detect photoshop filter followed by a blur filter on those edges, you could get cheap AA using just texture shaders. This was quickly adopted as it made things look slightly better for "free", and was called FXAA (And/or TXAA when they started using previous frames to help with the edge detection, T standing for "Temporal"). This was also adopted in games with their own implementations and in AMD's drivers too. All these systems still used native resolution, and so couldn't reconstruct data that was missing between the pixels, like original SSAA did. NVidia introduced DSR, which was basically a way of dynamically rendering at higher-than-native resolution for quality (or lower-than-native for performance, a trick borrowed from consoles). This allowed Super-ish sampling (as it wasn't a whole multiple of the native resolution like SSAA) again at the cost of having to render higher resolution screens. Now NVidia has taken their DLSS system, which uses AI/Machine Learning to try and fill in data where there wasn't any, to create a version of Super-Sampling. In the same way it (for performance) renders at a lower resolution then upscales with AI, this new system renders at (or above) native, upscales it with AI, then downsamples with smoothing like SSAA used to to construct an anti-aliased image, and called it DLRSS. If the AI upscaler recognizes objects like leaves and upscales them accurately, this will work well. Unfortunately, it seems that it isn't, so it's not much better than MSAA. In short, for best visual quality use SSAA or DSR (which will incur a heavy performance hit), followed by DLRSS if your system supports it and can't do SSAA or DSR, followed by MSAA, followed by FXAA if you have no other option.

I actually noticed this with Elden Ring. I accidently changed the Settings to 3200x1800, even tho I only have a 2560x1440 monitor. I got enough frames to not notice it, and I havent checked what kind of differnece in FPS its done, but when I realized I changed back to 2560x1440 and the picture was significantly worst. Im not sure if its the same effect, but it makes Elden Ring look very crisp and sharp for me. Without noticeably impacting FPS

I long stopped playing CSGO but still watch your videos from time to time. Playing other games, some older with weird artifacts when antialias is turned on, the discovery of downscaling is huge for me, especially if those games are stuck at 60 or 144 fps. Thank you for this video, you improved my gaming experience.

daddy upscaler is back in town

If a game has a render resolution setting (ex. red dead redemption 2, mirror's edge catalyst, warzone), does it make sense to use the control panel DSR (at 12:39), or is it better to use the in game setting. I'd assume it would end giving the same result, but maybe the Nvidia's Control Panel gives better performance or something

I love the music you always use for the ad segments. it's like I'm in a convenience store game show lol

18:38 You can tell it's an Aspin tree cause of the way it is, that's pretty neat!

Phenomenal video as always, Philip! Just wanted to chime in regarding the clarity of alpha textures because I literally just faced this issue today while learning Unreal Engine 4 - game engines heavily rely on mip-maps (a chain of progressively lower-resolution copies of a texture) that they switch to as the texture gets further away. Their primary purpose is to avoid shimmering on distant textures that can't be stably resolved at your current resolution, meaning at higher resolutions you use higher-res mips. While generally imperceptible by design, it's impossible to miss on alpha textures as once-clear leaves morph into a blobby mess. This can be mitigated by adjusting the LOD bias setting for your 3D application via Nvidia Control Panel or AMD's equivalent, forcing it to use higher res mips at the cost of potentially increased VRAM usage. Definitely something to keep in mind when employing upscaling and especially downsampling in the future!

13:17 is there any difference in 1% low fps? Because sometimes even when the average fps is the same you still might get really bad 1% low that can make the game feel a bit laggy.

I thought this was the case when I accidentally (and totally legally) downloaded some certain video files to watch in my free time. I noticed that a section of the "video file" - that was the same as in the prior "parts" - looked way better in 4k than in 1080p on my 1080p monitor. Feels great to have this thought validated. Now I need a way bigger disk though... well thank you nevertheless.

I do this all the time when i play a YT video. i have a 1080p screen and play it back at 144p. i get to ups to this, one is that the videos bit rate becasue of how youtube decies to do it is much higher, and the image is quite cleaner actually.

I bought 3080 for my bday some months ago but I play on a 1080p 60hz monitor so I use downsampling on every game I play, It just looks insanely sharp its awesome

I get called a freak of nature by my friends for preferring playing FPS games with low resolutions and very bad aliasing. The reason is that I always find it extremely easy to spot moving targets or distant enemies when visually they're so obtrusive. I honestly do believe that it is significantly easier to see opponents. The only times that I'm held back by my resolution are in cases with things like bars or bushes, and in my opinion, competitive FPS games shouldn't be bloating their maps with unnecessary details like that anyway, or at least they shouldn't be doing it in places where enemies can be.

Crazy that I watched this 22min video although I know about both downscaling and upscaling.^^ Nice delivery, good examples and explanation and thank you for including the topic of bottlenecks as well; so many people/gamers don't know about this. For me it was nice to see some more info or tests of DLDSR, but I'm a bit disappointed that it doesn't use the same DLSS algorithm apparently, but has this painting effect like DLSS 1.0 had and doesn't create subpixel detail. But IIRC it's a global driver switch and doesn't need to be implemented in a game, so it can't use motion vectors and do reconstruction like DLSS, but works like FSR (1.0) as a post-process effect.

So on a 1440p monitor with DLDSR at 1.78x, you get a 1920p looking image. If you just have 1440p with DLSS performance enabled, it's a 720p image upscaled. But if you have 1440p with DLDSR 1.78x and DLSS performance, it's actually closer to a 960p image AI upscaled to 1920p utilizing DLSS, which already produces a half decent image by itself.. but then the DLDSR forces that 1920p image with the guassian filter for a 2nd pass and downscales it back to your native 1440p. So you essentially get two AI passes to clean up your image. This can sometimes make the image appear "too clean" but mostly in games that have simplified texture-work. It still produces a nice image that looks better than native to me, but performs much better than native. You could also go up to DLSS quality + DLDSR 1.78x and still experience a very nice image quality and higher than native fps since the initial input render is 1280p. I prefer to use balanced or performance + DLDSR though because the image quality is still amazing to me.

I'm CPU capped in Death Stranding at about 60fps.. so I boosted my game resolution to 7K and downscaled it to my monitor and hottdamn does it look PRETTY now 😍. Objects in the distance are way crisper and easier to see, same with grass and foliage. Downscaling ftw

One reason that competitive gamers don't use AA is because of the 1% lows, you can have high averages with strong *micro* dips, because of -real- AA shenanigans, this improve a lot, and maybe is a non issue with good hardware in most cases

I liked that part with the CPU GPU graphs. That was the experiment I did when I started playing Overwatch. I enjoy upping the quality settings, but some of the shadow settings in overwatch hammer the CPU. I managed to set a sweet spot that makes my fps roughly gover at the 144 range. Right at my monitors refresh. But even if I max out every other gpu related setting, my cpu is still the limiting factor. So I actually play overwatch at 150% render resolution. Good thing the game has an in game slider for this. Autimagically it recommends 141% upscaling, but I just set it to 150% because I like the whole number.