Alright, so no, TAA doesn't look worse "compared to some older AA tech". For one thing our benchmarks for "some older AA tech" is MSAA used on 720p (on a good day) on consoles. MSAA did a valiant effort that generation, but it doesn't scale well with resolution, so while the comparatively very powerful PC GPUs were able to use it effectively at 1080p60 they were already struggling. And to be clear, those games looked like mud compared to newer targets.
We are now typically aiming for 4K, which is four times as many pixels, and at semi-arbitrary refreshes, often in the hundreds on PCs. TAA does a comparable-to-better job than MSAA much faster, so cranking up the base resolution is viable. DLSS goes one further and is able to upres the image, not just smooth out edges, even if the upres data is machine-generated.
"MSAA looked better" is almost entirely rose tinted glasses.
Internal resolution with DLSS is variable. Some games have a setting to select it on the fly depending on load, but all games give you a quality selector, so it's ultimately a matter of power to performance where you want to set your base resolution and your output resolution. DLSS is heavier than most TAA but much better. If you're keeping output res and settings, then yeah, you're going to lower resolution a bit to compensate the loss, probably, but you can absolutely run DLSS at native resolution (that's normally called DLAA). It looks great, but any AA at native 4K is gonna be heavy, so you need pretty powerful hardware for that.
So the internal resolution hasn't "gone down". You may need to lower it in some games to hit performance, but that's always been the case. What has changed is we're pushing super high definition images compared to the PS3 and even the PS4 generation. 4 to 16 times bigger.
And yeah, upscaling can show artifacts around some elements, but so can old AA. Modern versions of DLSS and FSR are a lot cleaner than older ones, but it's not a downgrade against most comparables. It becomes a matter of whether you think some of the ghosting on particles or fast motion was more annoying than fizzling on detailed areas or thin lines. If a preference for one over the other was the conversation I'd be more than happy to chalk it up to taste, but that's not how this is often framed. And again, modern upscaling is improving much faster than older AA techniques, a lot of the artifacting is gone, not just for new games, but for older ones where newer versions of these systems can be selected even if they weren't implemented at launch. It's actually pretty neat.
And that wall of text is, I think, why this conversation is so obtuse and confusing these days. That's a lot of nuance, and it's still superficial. People just go "this looks like crap because of particles or whatever" and I guess that's fine, but it barely correlates to anything in reality, it's quite deeply impacted by half-remembered results that really don't hold up as well as people remember and clarifying all this is certainly not worth the effort. Just saying it online is a lot simpler and easier, though.
Well, for one thing you're saying you haven't seen the latest version, so I already don't know what you were looking at or when. I don't know what settings you're using or what resolutions you were targeting.
Do I think there are any settings or resolutions in Cyberpunk where TAA looks noticeably better than any DLSS after 2? Absolutely, definitely 100% no. But hey, it'd help get an idea of what type of images we're comparing.
And it'd help to know what sorts of things you are seeing that make you notice a difference. What is it about that DLSS image that looks worse? I mean, let's be clear, these will mostly be the same base picture, just upscaled to whatever your monitor resolution is in slightly different ways. So what is it from each of those that is leading to this assessment? What are the problems we're talking about here?
Because last time I fired up Cyberpunk (and that was a couple of weeks ago) DLSS performed noticeably faster than TAA and looked effectively indistinguishable from native rendering at 4K.
So yeah, you're saying some weird stuff right here and from the explanations you're (not) giving you may as well have ran in from the street drenched in red fluid claiming the aliens stole your dog and I would have about as much connection to my lived reality to parse what's going on. I'm less concerned you're going to randomly stab me over your antialiasing preferences, sure, but in terms of using words to exchange recognizable information I'm kinda lost here.
Hah. I just went with Fedora on a new build, got all the way to setting up all the stuff I need that computer to do and found that it seems the power management is borked and sometimes it just decides to die on a black screen after being left unattended for no discernible reason.
That doesn't mean anything to you, but I wanted to whine in public about it. If you want to factor in my specific set of bugs feel free to do so, though.
I mean, I'm not gonna go build a Digital Foundry comparison video for you, but this type of argument is definitely what I'm talking about when I say I don't understand what people just claiming this out of the blue even think they're saying.
It's a subscription model for the artificial stuff. The natural version is dirt cheap. It's always the middle man with these modern services, I tell you.
You haven't seen it in a while, then, because that was definitely not true of the previous version and it's absolutely, objectively not true of the new transformer model version.
But honestly, other than what? the very first iteration? it hasn't been true in a while. TAA and DLSS tended to artifact in different ways. DLSS struggles with particles and fast movement, TAA struggles with most AA challenge areas like sub-pixel detail and thin lines. Honestly, for real time use at 4K I don't know of a more consistent, cleaner AA solution than DLSS. And I hesitate to call 4K DLAA a real time solution, but that's definitely the best option we have in game engines at this point.
I don't even like Nvidia as a company and I hate that DLSS is a proprietary feature, but you can't really argue with results.
See, this is the type of thing that weirds me out. Temporal AA doesn't look good compared to what? What do you mean "real resolution goes down"? Down from where? This is a very confusing statement to make.
I don't know what it is that you're supposed to dislike or what a lot of the terms you're using are supposed to mean. What is "image quality" in your view? What are you comparing as a reference point on all these things that go up and down?
I guess. It's not like downvotes mean anything here beyond... dopamine hits, I suppose?
I don't know that it's Lemmy. Both supporters and detractors don't seem to have a consistent thing they mean when they say "AI". I don't think many of them mean the same thing or agree with each other. I don't think many understand how some of the things they're railing about are put together or how they work.
I think the echo chamber element comes in when people who may realize they don't mean the same thing don't want to bring it up because they broadly align ideologically (AI yay or AI boo, again, it happens both ways), and so the issue gets perpetuated.
Aaaand we've now described all of social media, if not all of human discourse. Cool.
This is incredibly ironic because if you follow the history of this stuff somewhat rigorously there is a very good case to be made that the "pivot to video" beginning of the end starts when Jeff Gerstmann gets told by sales people at Gamespot to mellow out a review for advertising purposes and he aggressively refuses (as this was not at all a usual request), gets fired and starts Giant Bomb as a video-first outlet.
This is one of those things where an insider could have a very nuanced set of opinions about the relationships between the game marketing industry on one side and the craft and art of game criticism and journalism on the other, but it has somehow seeped down into mainstream opinion as "games journalism was all paid for", which is definitely wrong.
There have been magazines and newspapers with dedicated news reporting on TV, movies, cars and sports for longer than I've been alive.
I don't even disagree on the quality of a lot of the material, necessarily, but I'd argue the replacement, which is hyperfocused influencer coverage, is not better, and a good chunk of it is demonstrably worse.
At least old games journalism did actual critique. These days it's all either unbridled hype or ragebaiting, culture wars stuff.
Also, having grown measuring time by the monthly interval between paper magazine releases "I grew up reading a ton of early videogame blogs like Joystiq" reduced me to ashes.
DLSS runs on the same hardware as raytracing. That's the entire point. It's all just tensor math.
DLSS is one of those things where I'm not even sure what people are complaining about when they complain about it. I can see it being frame generation, which has downsides and is poorly marketed. But then some people seem to be claiming that DLSS does worse than TAA or older upscaling techniques when it clearly doesn't, so it's hard to tell. I don't think all the complainers are saying the same thing or fully understanding what they're saying.
Be honest, you were ready to do some hounding, saw that tackled preemptively and decided to pivot. I can see the hounding intent from here. Those ears are so droopy you're becoming a better boy as we speak.
One of the joys of learning languages is getting to be equally annoyed at anglophones thinking ending words in "o" and "a" is hilarious and at Spanish speakers thinking that adding "ing" to random words counts as English.
Alright, so no, TAA doesn't look worse "compared to some older AA tech". For one thing our benchmarks for "some older AA tech" is MSAA used on 720p (on a good day) on consoles. MSAA did a valiant effort that generation, but it doesn't scale well with resolution, so while the comparatively very powerful PC GPUs were able to use it effectively at 1080p60 they were already struggling. And to be clear, those games looked like mud compared to newer targets.
We are now typically aiming for 4K, which is four times as many pixels, and at semi-arbitrary refreshes, often in the hundreds on PCs. TAA does a comparable-to-better job than MSAA much faster, so cranking up the base resolution is viable. DLSS goes one further and is able to upres the image, not just smooth out edges, even if the upres data is machine-generated.
"MSAA looked better" is almost entirely rose tinted glasses.
Internal resolution with DLSS is variable. Some games have a setting to select it on the fly depending on load, but all games give you a quality selector, so it's ultimately a matter of power to performance where you want to set your base resolution and your output resolution. DLSS is heavier than most TAA but much better. If you're keeping output res and settings, then yeah, you're going to lower resolution a bit to compensate the loss, probably, but you can absolutely run DLSS at native resolution (that's normally called DLAA). It looks great, but any AA at native 4K is gonna be heavy, so you need pretty powerful hardware for that.
So the internal resolution hasn't "gone down". You may need to lower it in some games to hit performance, but that's always been the case. What has changed is we're pushing super high definition images compared to the PS3 and even the PS4 generation. 4 to 16 times bigger.
And yeah, upscaling can show artifacts around some elements, but so can old AA. Modern versions of DLSS and FSR are a lot cleaner than older ones, but it's not a downgrade against most comparables. It becomes a matter of whether you think some of the ghosting on particles or fast motion was more annoying than fizzling on detailed areas or thin lines. If a preference for one over the other was the conversation I'd be more than happy to chalk it up to taste, but that's not how this is often framed. And again, modern upscaling is improving much faster than older AA techniques, a lot of the artifacting is gone, not just for new games, but for older ones where newer versions of these systems can be selected even if they weren't implemented at launch. It's actually pretty neat.
And that wall of text is, I think, why this conversation is so obtuse and confusing these days. That's a lot of nuance, and it's still superficial. People just go "this looks like crap because of particles or whatever" and I guess that's fine, but it barely correlates to anything in reality, it's quite deeply impacted by half-remembered results that really don't hold up as well as people remember and clarifying all this is certainly not worth the effort. Just saying it online is a lot simpler and easier, though.