Latest Nvidia drivers reveal AI-powered downscaling feature called DLDSR

Daniel Sims

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Why it matters: Nvidia revealed this week that its January 14 Game Ready Driver will bring a new feature to RTX graphics cards that improves the company’s Dynamic Super Resolution (DSR) function, improving image quality without the same performance hit.

Dynamic Super Resolution is Nvidia’s method for letting users easily downsample games. It renders a game at a higher resolution, then shrinks it back down to the native resolution of your monitor. This results in extremely effective anti-aliasing but only performs well if a GPU has the extra horsepower to run at that higher resolution. It’s a good way to make older games with outdated anti-aliasing technology look cleaner.

Deep Learning Dynamic Super Resolution (DLDSR) uses RTX graphics cards’ Tensor cores to make this process more efficient. Nvidia’s announcement claims using DLDSR to play a game at 2.25x the output resolution looks as good as using DSR at 4x the resolution, but achieves the same framerate as 1x resolution.

Nvidia demonstrates this with Bethesda and Arkane’s 2017 Prey, first using DSR to downsample from 4K to 1080p, then using DLDSR to downsample from 1620p to 1080p. The 4K and 1620p screenshots look similar, but the 1620p one has a 40-frame-per-second advantage, almost hitting the same framerate as the original 1080p image.

Unlike DLSS which developers have to manually implement in each game, DLDSR will work in most games. The feature should appear in the Nvidia control panel as an option in Manage 3D Settings > DSR Factors.

Nvidia also announced it worked with popular ReShade author Pascal Gilcher to make some new filters for Freestyle, an Nvidia feature that can change a game’s appearance in real time. One of them is a modified version of Gilcher’s Ray Tracing Reshade Filter.

This driver update is the same one that will include the drivers for the PC version of God of War, which also comes out January 14.

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One of those boxes is going to turn into a creepy crawly and jump at me.

I think I see some minor differences, but nothing I'd notice when playing. I don't take a lot of screenshots.

The Reshade integration is much more interesting than downsampling.
 
If you're on the breadline you shouldn't even be thinking about gaming.
I'm nowhere the breadline and I'm also nowhere near foolish enough to pay these kinds of prices. People who pay these prices for GPUs end up in breadlines.

Meh, my first car cost $500. My GPU is selling for 4x that amount currently on the resale market. I never stood in a breadline.
my first car was a 96 Honda accord and I paid $1500(~$1700 after tax) for it back in 2008
 
Maybe for laptops or if you have 1440p monitor so 4K downscaled in non-fps seems the other option . I suppose third is someone with a RTX 2060, or 1080 etc and hasn't upgraded their monitor.
Anyone would can afford a RTX 3060 plus can afford a higher resolution monitor - now just maybe some 1080p monitors could do 360Hz -for competitive gamers - and when they want to relax in a different style game could make sense .
Thought of one more case - outputting to old large screen tv - limited to 30or 60fps
 
This is probably one of the biggest feature updates to a driver all year. DLDSR is essentially DLSS for all games, especially useful those of us at 4k144Hz. And pascals "raytracing" shader via Freestyle will make eye-candy for older games an easily accessible treat.
 
Maybe for laptops or if you have 1440p monitor so 4K downscaled in non-fps seems the other option . I suppose third is someone with a RTX 2060, or 1080 etc and hasn't upgraded their monitor.
Anyone would can afford a RTX 3060 plus can afford a higher resolution monitor - now just maybe some 1080p monitors could do 360Hz -for competitive gamers - and when they want to relax in a different style game could make sense .
Thought of one more case - outputting to old large screen tv - limited to 30or 60fps
But 1080 doesn't support this
 
Quite honestly can't really see a material difference in those screenshots. Doesn't look like it does any harm but I don't quite see the point.
 
Quite honestly can't really see a material difference in those screenshots. Doesn't look like it does any harm but I don't quite see the point.

Really, the contrast is much better, there's a lot less aliasing on the lamp grille, the textures overall look more detailed to my eye.
 
Nvidias really are onto something with their deep learning tech. DLSS has been very well received and now we are seeing all these other things coming out that will improve image quality for minimal cost using AI generated algorithms. I feel that if AMD and Intel need to catch up if they want to be able to compete. And that doesn’t mean the dumpster fire that is FSR, AMD need to do much better than that to compete with all these deep learning solutions.
 
I will concern myself with this when Nvidia starts selling cards at a reasonable MSRP. Otherwise, I could care less.
 
The only problem with this is that it doesn't actually work right. At least for a lot of people it is not working. There is really no guide on how to use this either. From what I can tell though, you just turn it on and then set the resolution in-game to the DL DSR resolution, so that should be 3820X2160 for 2.25x. The problem is I still see just as much drop in performance as I would if I were to just use DSR. I should get near 1440p performance and that's just not happening. I think what its actually doing is upscaling the 4K (yes, 2.25x 4k with DL DSR), because the picture looks phenomenal, even better than the typical downscale from 4K. But, it should look nearly as good if it were working properly and 60-80% higher frame rate too.
 
I'm nowhere the breadline and I'm also nowhere near foolish enough to pay these kinds of prices. People who pay these prices for GPUs end up in breadlines.


my first car was a 96 Honda accord and I paid $1500(~$1700 after tax) for it back in 2008
Haha, you were riding in style, my friend. Mine was a 1990 Mustang with a 4 cylinder. No reverse or third gear. Ran it until it stopped running and sold it for $500.
 
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