Technology

Based on the demos of DLSS, I don't have a very high opinion of it. It seems to have the same "shining" problems that older methodologies had.

The promising high-quality stuff is VRS: those demos are incredible, though they require more manual work. Instead of rendering a 1080p "fake" 4k image and relying upon AI to upscale it... you render a 4k-image but tell the GPU which sections to render at 2x2 pixels instead.

Or even as low as 4x4 (aka: you may have a 3840 x 2160 pixel monitor, but the 4x4 region is rendered with roughly the same resources as 960 x 540 resolution). As it turns out, a huge number of regions in your video games have 4x4 or 2x2 appropriate regions, especially the ones that are obscured by fog, blur, and other effect worked on top.

Notice: the bottom of the screen of the above racing game will be obscured by motion-blur. So why render it at full 3840 x 2160 resolution? Its just a waste of compute-resources to render a high-quality image and then blur it away. Instead, its rendered at 4x4 (aka: equivalent to 960 x 540), and after the blur, they basically look the same. The rest of the screen can be rendered at 1x1 (aka: full 3840 x 2160). Furthermore, its very simple programming to figure out which areas are having such blurs, and even the direction of motion blur (ex: 2x1 vs 1x2 if you're doing horizontal blurs vs vertical blur passes after-the-fact).

Meanwhile, DLSS is "ignorant" about the layers of effects (fog, blur, etc. etc.) and difficult to work into the overall rendering pipeline. VRS already is implemented in more games than DLSS ever was and is the future.

You see, when a feature is actually used, it quietly gets implemented into every video game in DirectX12Ultimate or PS5 or XBox without anyone sweating. Everyone knows VRS is the future, no marketing needed. NVidia needed to push DLSS (unsuccessfully, IMO), because they're part of the AI hype train and trying to sell their AI cores.