Consider this. Ten years ago, Digital Foundry was mulling over Alan Wake’s 960×540 resolution (actually 544p!) and wondering if reducing pixel count this much was a compromise too far. Ten years later – almost to the day – we’re playing the latest game from the same developer at the same internal resolution, and in some respects, it looks better than native 1080p. Nvidia’s DLSS – deep-learning super-sampling – has evolved to a new 2.0 rendition and the results of its AI upscaling in Remedy’s Control are simply astonishing.
As we’ve documented in the past, DLSS has had something of a chequered history, its implementation varying in effectiveness from one game to the next – but the underlying principles remain unchanged. Next generation rendering techniques – ray tracing in particular – often come with a substantial cost to performance. DLSS works on the principle of improving performance by lowering the internal pixel count, then using a mixture of temporal and AI inferencing components to reconstruct the image up to a higher resolution.
Typically, the new DLSS 2.0 offers three presets – performance, balanced and quality – which render at 50 per cent, 58 per cent and 67 per cent of native resolution on both axes on titles such as Wolfenstein: Youngblood. Control is somewhat different. It’s a little more transparent in that the user simply specifies internal and output resolutions.
Of course, this isn’t the first DLSS implementation we’ve seen in Control. The game shipped with a decent enough rendition of the technology that didn’t actually use the machine learning Tensor core component of the Nvidia Turing architecture, relying on the standard CUDA cores instead. It still provided a huge performance boost, and generally looked better the higher up the resolution chain you went, but the new 2.0 revision offers a profound improvement.
Temporal ghosting is massively cut back, while break-up on sub-pixel detail and transparent textures are reduced to a minimum. Impressively, we were able to find examples of the new DLSS 2.0 at 1080p delivering improved visual quality over the older version running at 1440p. Just as we saw in Wolfenstein: Youngblood, the new DLSS is also capable of measuring up nicely to native resolution rendering, even if the core image is actually built up from just 25 per cent of the overall pixel count.