1mo ago

Upscaling really is black magic

I have an RTX 3060 that I bought about two years ago. Until recently I only had a 1080p 75Hz monitor, so I could play pretty much anything on max settings.

Then I decided to treat myself to a 1440p 180Hz monitor, which has been amazing. Obviously this is a lot more GPU intensive, so I have had to turn down some settings. Then I decided to try out FSR. I'm on Linux and gaming mostly through Proton, so it was as easy as adding a launch command.

Holy crap. Elden ring (admittedly not a very intensive game) went from a choppy 50 fps on high settings and medium ray tracing, to a smooth 60 fps on maxed out settings and high ray tracing with FSR Quality. And I can't even tell the difference from the upscaling! I'm super impressed and can't wait to try out FSR 2 and DLSS now!

6 comments

I actually really dislike DLSS and FSR. At least to me the upscaling is pretty noticeable (but not the end of the world), but the artifacts that it causes drive me insane. I haven't tested Onion Ring with it. But for example FH5 I get all sorts of ghost images on my screen and they go away as soon as I turn off DLSS.
Also weirdly on my laptop I got worse performance. I'm assuming that's because I'm 100% CPU limited and there is a bit of CPU overhead to running DLSS.
- onion ring
  lmao
- From what I understand, FSR1 is not a temporal upscaled, so it shouldn't have ghosting.
  That does cause the quality to be lower, though

DLSS is extremely noticeable to me at stronger levels. I usually turn it on but keep it set to “quality” instead of “performance”. It’s still slightly noticeable but not that bad at that setting.
Stronger DLSS just looks like blurry mush to me.

Yeah I’m a big fan of upscaling myself. I hear a lot of complaints on the internet that this means developers won’t optimize their games because upscaling exists, but I think it’s great because it gives older/weaker GPUs (like your 3060) some longevity.
Heck, I use DLSS on my 4080 when I don’t want a game to suck so much power.

The upscaling technologies they've been building into modern graphics stacks also have benefits for much older games where the performance isn't necessarily needed. There's an old game I like to play, Railroad Tycoon 2, which doesn't run at resolutions higher than 1024x768 and modern upscaling can make that game look absolutely gorgeous despite being 4+ pixels per original pixel. I'm sure it provides similar benefits to emulators and the like too!

6 comments