Red Dead Redemption 2 - DLSS's's Biggest Challenge Yet

[@SpookySkeletonGang]

THANK YOU for showing DLSS with actual footage instead of stills. Every damn video I see about it just shows stills, which of course does a great job of hiding every artifact present in DLSS. I don't think this is malicious, just short sighted. AI upscaling for stills is quite good (as you know haha), so seeing how it does with moving subjects is a lot more useful. Great video. DLSS is still really fucking good, but I just hate that so many people think it's perfect and fail to point out the flaws.

[@blightviolin7322]

this made me mad when DF claimed dlss 1080p input looked better than native 1800p of consoles with still shots/slow cutscenes they misdirect so many people. dlss is a miracle in still shots, i bet it can even build a native-like image from a 360p input source. things get muddy when you actually move the camera... yet they never cover that

[@Sinoops]

@@blightviolin7322 In some games I think it actually does now look really close to native in motion. But RDR2 is certainly not one of them.

[@MLWJ1993]

It's not perfect, neither is "native resolution" or any other form of image reconstruction or upscaling.

[@gorps]

Actually DLSS looks bad in this case because TAA sharpening is turned on while running DLSS. It looks better with that setting turned off

[@eLemonnader]

I think my brain is broken when it comes to the DLSS artifacts, even in this video. All I see is the massive increase in clarity. I'm in the 'fuck TAA' crowd, personally. Never preferred it in anything. I can handle flashies and ghosts here and there as long as the image is crisp and not sharpened to death.

[@TinyTroglodyte]

360p probably isn't the most optimal way to be viewing this. I'm going to wait for KZbin to process this...

[@OnBrandRP]

Maybe we're all just using DLSS 1.0 XD

[@EdselAmbience]

lmfao same its still going

[@DanielSuarez-tt4jp]

Anyday now...

[@zoiioio3653]

but it is

[@gavaac]

Yeah any minute now…

[@JayanthRajakumar]

Plot twist, Philip uploaded in 360p just to mess with everyone.

[@BlindBison]

lol

[@KesslerCOIL]

Feels like it tbh. I've never had a video take over an hour to process higher than 360p.

[@cozmicnonsense]

I'm starting to believe that

[@ViperSurf]

I agree, were onto you Phillip 🧐

[@wibs0n68]

Mayne philip upscale 8k soon?

[@weezerfan3571]

this is the longest ive ever seen a video stay at 360p for

[@BlindBison]

same lol

[@matrix9452]

I saw other videos with this issue today, must be something with KZbin servers

[@Signynt]

@@matrix9452 I thought the quality looked bad today in general, but thought it was just my internet, interesting to hear it must be server side

[@Triumph263]

And it's STILL at 360p 2 hours later.

[@purplelizard0102]

rdr2 tribute

[@Kazumo]

God, thank you so much for talking about these issues, Philip. My friends never acknowledged that they exist in the game and they called me crazy for thinking it's either fuzzy or blurry at times.

[@OutlawedPoet]

your friends must be playing the game at 16k if they dont think its a blurry mess filled with artifacts

[@Damonj17]

Clicked on the video so fast that youtube hasn't processed higher resolution than 360p. Hilarious. I'll be back later.

[@mememan9890]

I was wondering what was going on too. God damn lmao

[@avert4003]

YEP

[@magneticflux-]

Just DLSS the video to 1080p lmao

[@lssjgaming1599]

@@Anon.G still stuck on 360 on my phone

[@LeafMaltieze]

same

[@michaelmu6765]

KZbin could use some DLSS for it's 360p videos

[@waldolemmer]

*its

[@You-in6mb]

They already did. It is called Encoding.

[@berkk29]

You mean 1080p ? Because it still looks like shit

[@Spookyhoobster]

The reason DLSS works so well is because it has game data to work with. That game data knows exactly what should be shown on the screen, but rendering engines make compromises so that things work efficiently. The DLSS uses machine learning to improve those compromises, where as a fully uploaded 360p video has no compromises. That's EXACTLY the data that's stored (minus KZbin's compression). CAD software actually doesn't make those compromises and is (pretty much) 100% accurate, because of that it can be pretty choppy to run even with just a few objects. Edit: Oh looks like KZbin had this video stuck at 360p after the upload :P

[@waldolemmer]

@@Spookyhoobster INB4 someone wooshes you

[@GMMReviews]

Me: "I just wanna play RDR2 at above 60fps." Phillip: *"The trees are too pixilated."*

[@hotmotorsports3756]

same

[@guily6669]

Hell, when I usually don't see pixels for me is when the problems start :) But then again it seems RDR2 is really sadly a anti-pixel game because no matter what seems like it's made with AA as a permanent coded feature (or can you disable AA completely??). I my self, rather get pixels than vaseline on my screen from the AA. I only played RDR2 on my PS4 Pro and the biggest problem was really the vaseline blur killing my eyes and the nice ghosting artifact from the TAA on motion and it seems the PC version is no better, some of those Vaseline games I totally saved my eyes just switching from console to PC to disable the shitty AA, however sadly some games seem persistent... Even had a game where I had to modify a few files just to get rid of AA as it was pretty locked into the game and no way to disable just to then realize that the game was really only made to be used with AA or looked completely abnormally strange FFS... PS: Guess the proper way to play RDR2 then is to add 1000% postprocessing sharpening then 😁

[@hotmotorsports3756]

@@guily6669 thanks!

[@PlanetaJuegosPC]

*The bush behind the tree is too pixelated

[@OutlawedPoet]

@@guily6669 "Guess the proper way to play RDR2 then is to add 1000% postprocessing sharpening then" You were probably being ironic, but sharpening can't really fix this mess. The slightest amount of sharpening in this game introduces a fuck ton of noise and haloing. I see people playing at 1080p with like 6 different sharpening filters enabled all maxed out and I have absolutely no idea how they think the game looks good at all. Even 20% NVIDIA sharpening produces awful results.

[@AngryApple]

So basically the game is designed with TAA in mind with checkerboard rendering and temporal upscale and DLSS is just a slap on and doenst produce good results with all the trickery rockstar did with the renderer. All the flickery stuff properly comes because the game is still rendering in a checkerboard pattern

[@NiceGuyShaders]

Yes, I think the renderer is designed to render only and only with TAA. When you turn it off, everything looks terrible. Tree leaves look dead, Contact shadows look stepped, checkerboard pattern jumps into your eyes, and etc... You can't play the game without TAA and even though the DLSS has a kind of similar nature to TAA, It can't eliminate those terrible artifacts and rockstar just didn't want to pay some time fixing it. Tnx Rockstar :/

[@luisantos1996]

@@NiceGuyShaderswhen they released this game dlss and ray tracing was just about to come out, they didn't built the game around those features, for them properly implement ray tracing and does they would have to rewrite the whole code, and since Red Dead online had barely any support it makes more unlikely for them to spend time over it.

[@DripDripDrip69]

Only alpha transparency is checkerboarded.

[@samogonbrother]

@@luisantos1996 its just rockstar are lazy when it comes to post release to their single player games

[@Sinoops]

@@samogonbrother I think it's because as soon as a single player title is done they like to quickly move on and start work on the next game. They half ass the RDO and GTA Online updates to keep people interested while most of their resources are going into their next triple a title.

[@rynominnie83]

6:34 "so until I upgrade(???) to Windows 10 again..."? uhmmmm heavy shade there Phil

[@woosix7735]

windows 11 moment

[@rosuav]

Someone needs to ship some aloe vera to Redmond, they just got burrrrrned

[@rutviklhase4880]

Wow I am here so early that the only quality option available is 360p

[@cameron9122]

I'm stuck at 480 😂

[@ederbarrero5585]

Low res gang 😔

[@_issu3]

360p gang wya

[@thebunfromouterspace]

30 minutes later, and it's still fucked lmao

[@fartbasket92]

I'm stuck at 720p. Cmon I just wanna watch at 1080p lol

[@lowenevvan8619]

Some experience in game dev here: Any level of transparency is very expensive, none more expensive then the most accurate method, Alpha Blending, when you simply add the colors into the scene. Not only is it the most expensive type of rendering, but it can't occlude objects to force things behind it to unload, and it's accuracy in even modern engines is poor, as render order is solved per-object, rendering it very inaccurate for freeform 3D spaces. This is surprisingly still untouched territory in the modern era. The Dreamcast had hardware support for transparency on a per-vertex level, while modern Unity/Unreal Engine still relies on object positions and sort distance. The other methods of solving for transparency are rather straightforwards, Alpha Clipping & Hashed. Alpha clip is simply having a pixel either visible or not, so when it attempts to draw a part of the geometry it just doesn't and will attempt to render what's behind it. Hashing is a little more complicated, and what RDR2 seems to be doing. You take either of the above methods and test for transparency in passes, solving for so much each frame and building onto the result in the following frames. This can be masked by TAA but looks extremely poor regardless for real-time rendered games, albeit it can be solved with higher resolutions when the pixels are cheaper to throw out.

[@hamzix6599]

i am not a game dev but I think using raytraced rendering will solve this or maybe not ?

[@oOKenduOo]

Thanks for explaining! Will sharpening even effect the image when in motion? (For example the TAA Sharpening filter setting in RDR2)

[@Alexthereek-ob7vt]

@@hamzix6599full path tracing could possibly work

[@Heavenira]

I'm honestly just here for 2kliksphilip's voice.

[@Malkolm52]

Who isn't?

[@ArowStone]

+

[@SPACECOWBOY_Hej]

He also lays shit out perfectly, i watch his csgo vids too, even though i despise csgo and think its the worst cs in cs history.

[@Robstrap]

@@SPACECOWBOY_Hej actually the csgo vids are made by 3kliksphilip. Not 2kliksphilip. They're different people 🌝

[@SPACECOWBOY_Hej]

@@Robstrap yaya they know eachother

[@leosm07]

We need DLSS to upscale this video from 360p

[@BottomOfTheDumpsterFire]

7:30 "KZbin likes to crush details such as these" Sure does!

[@moopledoopy]

DLSS would certainly be useful for watching right now :P

[@mikolajmrz]

"I use the AI upscaling to destroy the AI upscaling"

[@littlehhh4338]

we get it, u cant afford good internet or a good quality monitor

[@RobCXS]

@@littlehhh4338 you insult people when you're the idiot, when the video is uploaded it is in 360p/480p for a while which is what the OP was referring to

[@littlehhh4338]

@@RobCXS but the video is not uploaded in 360p/480p you can check the quality buddy, use your eyes, not hard.

[@FleaOnMyWiener]

@@littlehhh4338 they're talking about KZbin's processing forcing you to watch at a lower quality for the first 30 minutes or so after a video is uploaded. Use your head.

[@callmeivan2064]

The fact this video's quality settings just jumps from 480p straight to 2160p. My poor Internet.

[@obsolete4735]

I cannot imagine how much work was done for this video. You are crazy man, best DLSS video so far.

[@minerkey682]

*shows 1440p quality* me watching at 360p on a 1080p monitor: mmmmm, the details

[@Yveldi]

I have no quality choice between 720p and 4K. WTF, KZbin?

[@mimisusanti3572]

@@Yveldi For Me, KZbin Already Opened 1080p 60fps

[@minerkey682]

@C this is a drawing of a photo of me in Hanoi from 2019 - where pollution masks were pretty much everywhere

[@Yveldi]

@C Why are you watching 3kliksphilip's second channel, then? Kekw.

[@TexelGuy]

Hmm, so since the game engine can't handle transparencies well, the game's TAA was built around that issue so that it looks blurrier than it should, while on the upside hiding checkerboard artifacts on hair and trees at lower resolutions. DLSS, while resolving more detail, wasn't built to hide these artifacts found specifically in the RAGE engine, so it ends up looking worse sometimes.

[@Sinoops]

The flickering trees and checkerboarded hair makes it unusable for me. As someone who has spent some time playing with DLSS on RDR2 I actually think the issues with it are much worse than what Philip showed. You can notice ghosting on almost every model outline and the reflections and parallax mapping sometimes flicker like the white noise on a tube television. It's so distracting that Arthur's head and even your horses tail look like they are being viewed through a screen door. I also should mention I exclusively play at DLSS Quality setting at 1440p and I was noticing all of this stuff. I personally would only use DLSS on RDR2 if I was upscaling to 4k.

[@MrMeanh]

@@Sinoops Have not tried DLSS in RDR2 yet (got a 6800xt in my gaming system atm), but for me as a person gaming at 1440p and in the games I have tried DLSS in for more than a few minutes (WD Legion, Control, Death Stranding and CP2077) I almost always prefer native if I can get 60fps without sacrificing too much graphical fidelity. The only game I actually used DLSS (Quality mode) in most of the time playing was CP2077 because it made it possible to hit 60 fps with almost all RT maxed out on a 3080. All the other games did not gain enough performance to make up for some of the noticable issues they added with DLSS, as an example WD Legion had more flickering, moiré patterns and extra blur in motion even with DLSS Quality compared to native 1440p.

[@Anderson-dx6wb]

@@Sinoops Flicker of the hair, looks like from playstation 4. Played this game on PS4 and PC and in both hair looks like they kinda laggy.

[@MLWJ1993]

It's used on a lot of engines though, not just RAGE. It's there to cut back on alpha sorting & blending which is a problem dating back years (costs a lot of CPU resources to properly sort & blend transparency).

[@nuggetpiece]

@@Sinoops i dunno, im running it on my lg cx 48" with 4k and hdr. I think dlss quality makes everything look much sharper. And with the contrast hdr makes usually wearing a hat on i cant even notice the hair unless i stick my face to the screen. I think the game looks overall much better. (And in a huge fps player who would never use dlss in an fps because of motion)

[@branpod]

This is one of those games that I am looking forward to playing in 10 years from now at a ridiculously high resolution.

[@deathrager2404]

bro this game isnt even optimized. anywhere outside towns/cities you get good fps and the cpu and gpu usage is above 90 percent. but in cities/towns? gpu usage isnt even 60 percent. that is poor optimization.

[@DragonOfTheMortalKombat]

​@@deathrager2404 Your CPU is a huge bottleneck. What are your specs ?

[@DragonOfTheMortalKombat]

8K 120Fps HDR with RT mod.

[@deathrager2404]

@@DragonOfTheMortalKombat did u read what i said bro? can you stop with the bot reply? did u read what i said? when the cpu and gpu usage is above 90 percent, i get around 85-90 fps. my cpu is not the bottleneck, the optimization is the bottleneck. because there isnt any. i understand my cpu is old, sure, but it doesnt even reach 100 percent usage. get lost you bot.

[@MannFace51]

The ultimate test of RDR2’s trademark artifacting is looking at the wheels of a wagon while it’s in motion. Would’ve loved to have seen a comparison on that front.

[@binarysplit3178]

One of the reasons for trails might be "Phone-Wire Anti-Aliasing" - a trick where thin objects like phone wires and horse reins are rendered a few pixels wider than usual, but with a texture that fades to transparent so that the "anti-aliasing" is a result of texture sampling (which blends texels, giving much better results) instead of geometry anti-aliasing (which takes discrete, unblended samples and causes jaggies). The downside is that transparent geometry is still geometry - either you include the whole effect (including the extra pixels of transparency) in the depth buffer and potentially risk z-fighting artifacts, or exclude them from the depth buffer causing DLSS to think they're painted on the sky.

[@Spoggi99YT]

I am late to the party but 2.25x DLDSR with Quality DLSS (version 3.5 with preset C via DLSS Tweaks) looks absolutely incredible at 1440p! There is almost no ghosting too, except on some birds and power poles in certain conditions.

[@rottenapple_]

No need to do all of that useless crap. Just install DLSS 3.7, problem solved.

[@wizardd]

@@rottenapple_ lies. dldsr + dlss quality is amazing in this game.

[@rottenapple_]

@@wizardd not lies, you're full of shit.

[@rottenapple_]

@@wizardd fucking noob

[@ItzTapt]

I hate the TAA on rdr2 with a passion and every time I load this damn game up taa turns back on again like a zombie refusing to die after 17 smacks with a shovel.

[@briando8150]

I like that all of kliksphilip's interests are projected onto his fans as well. A lot of us seen to be willing to wait for the video to be higher quality to watch it as it is intended. Can't say that for most other youtubers. If you're reading this filip, you could unlist the videos to allow it time in process on youtube first before pushing it out to your subs We love you and your content phil :)

[@PolajLive]

"If your pc is gpu limited, consider playing at an above native resolution" Me with gtx 750ti: 4K LETS GO

[@yurinevess]

he said cpu limited, not gpu limited

[@PolajLive]

@@yurinevess 11:18 ???

[@hmmm9183]

Its for rtx who have dlss, to have the sharpening and look that we think is better than native while having the same performance

[@hmmm9183]

@@yurinevess cpu wouldnt even make sense

[@The1Wolfcast]

"If dlss can resolve this games quality, then it can fix anything." Even my marriage?

[@EdgeSky]

Damn, boah. I can feel the pain from here

[@smogre5143]

I'd like to thank youtube for playing this at 360p

[@flarfo348]

hi vector

[@smogre5143]

@@flarfo348 greetings disciple

[@mohammad-zabih]

seems like i found a super channel to sub to !!!! someone who actually research before talking !!!! thank you so much for existing sir !

[@RantyZombie]

watching this in 360p is just beautiful

[@wigunad1637]

my eyes burn watching it at 360p, its been an hour and still waiting for full resolution KZbin compressed

[@buriedstpatrick2294]

I feel like you really stepped up your editing game here with some nice transitions and motion graphics. Good job Philip :)

[@RubiksTheGamer]

This is the best looking video that I hate having to watch at 360p

[@xXSilentAgent47Xx]

7:03 Seen that issue many times on console even on some other games at 1080p. I don't know why but that's close explanation.

[@noamias4897]

I see you everywhere lol

[@ImAltair1]

5 hours later and this is still at 720p. Amazing

[@iSenZatiion]

The thing about red dead that has always annoyed me is the fact that if you stand completely still, the image is super nice, sharp and no blurry background. But the second you start looking around the background becomes very blurry, and that is something DLSS fixed for me. The image looks the same when you stand still or if you are looking/moving around. DLSS on Quality playing at 1080p is a nice improvement for me.

[@clark98881]

now we have dldsr with dlss the image looks more better.

[@ajfgaming7387]

Swapped DLSS to 2.5.1 and my God it's amazing. There's almost 0 ghosting at 1440p quality DLSS

[@ajfgaming7387]

@Eternity 3.1.1 v2 is really good, especially if using DLSS tweaker. If not, I'd recommend 2.5.1 still. So far, it's the best for ghosting, in my opinion :)

[@RidentGaming]

I started replaying this game as soon as this update went live, partially inspired by your mention of rdr2 getting DLSS in recent video. This game is fucking fantastic, and even better with about 30 extra frames.

[@Beastw1ck]

Was waiting for a Digital Foundry video on RDR2 DLSS and this was just as good.

[@yeetleslaw8529]

yeah, I'll come back to watch this later when youtube is done processing it.

[@Chaoes96]

The video I was waiting for. Thank you

[@OVERKILL_PINBALL]

An hour later, still only 360p?

[@shadowprogamer6]

Thanks for this! Best dlss vs native comparison I've seen

[@HDConcussionz]

Still refreshing trying to get this 1080p

[@YetiFell]

youtube just doesn't feel like it today

[@Lead_Foot]

It takes a long ass time. If the video is 4k hdr it can be multiple days before the highest quality is available.

[@TweetyOW]

I was on high resolution but it change to 360 halfway through the video

[@araghon007]

@@Lead_Foot I highly doubt it's HDR, since as far as I know there is no tool to record HDR content on PC. As for quality, KZbin seems to be really drunk today, switching between available resolutions

[@HDConcussionz]

@@Lead_Foot Finally back to watch it haha.

[@Hirens.]

Amazing video! Love the content. I was hoping someone will make such a video. Great work!

[@RawAustin]

Regarding Rockstar's RAGE engine and how it handles alphas, there's a lot of insight to be gleaned from Adrian Couregges' dissection of GTAV's render pipeline that I'd highly recommend going through. I think you'd thoroughly enjoy his write-ups. In essence, the reason behind the dithering on transparent materials is the usage of a technique called alpha-stippling, which renders such materials in a checkerboard pattern as observed by Philip to smooth out LOD transitions. It does nothing to improve performance, so the transitions might've been startling enough for Rockstar to deem the artifacts worth it by comparison.

[@craigory8123]

1:07 the way the gta score faded in was so smooth lmao

[@weses2]

What I do is enable TAA with FXAA on top and only use control panel sharpening to sharpen both at once (in-game sharpening only sharpens the TAA). In terms of image quality I find this looks best and makes lower resolutions more acceptable (more FPS), especially in fast motion with FXAA smoothing what TAA can't catch up with

[@coldrunhershel604]

I love that it jumped from 480p and 360p straight to 4k and no intermediate options

[@godofredo404]

40 mins past and still no higher quality, PHILIP!

[@Anas-ux9vi]

I am not sure if this was his doing, but I am glad to join you in your anger.

[@BottomOfTheDumpsterFire]

Still nothing and it's been nearly 3 hours. I can actually see some issues even at 360p

[@loonloon9365]

we are being trolled

[@Xeller_real]

Nothing still

[@juan.6255]

its 3 week now and they finally added 1080p

[@bagel8685]

0:03 I don't think anyone has summarized my views on this game better than you

[@AttakusZakus]

Maybe the 4K resolution was the friends we made along the way.

[@superspencebros832]

watched the whole video i still haven't noticed what he was talking about

[@Strafprozessordnung]

3 hours later, still 360p (Hamburg, Germany) Philip, I think your video is broken :(

[@seruppo4219]

I love how you care about captions. And I love how you put jokes that are not in the video to them. Gigapixel the Waifu. I love how you care about everything. And I, hope we, notice and care about it.

[@raymondmichalak1026]

It’s been over a hour and it’s still 360p, somethings wrong...

[@noahbreuer5095]

I honestly thought I did something wrong because hair looked so horrible. Guess it is just rdr2 then.

[@mohsenessa1195]

5 hours in, we've been blessed with 480p.

[@trignite]

720p now

[@JFinns]

@@trignite 1080p/60fps now

[@burger406]

very early video! been looking forward to this one! -burger40

[@00WhiteBlade]

"Windows 11 doesn't like it for some reason, so until I upgrade to Windows 10..." BURN

[@Deliveredmean42]

Hold on... Why is he using Windows 11? Isn't it unstable and in testing phase?

[@kebab6617]

2:08 "ghostly" trail? i assume this is why this vid popped up in my recommended this time of year lol. freaking algorithms

[@caloss2]

3 hours and it's 720p now. Thanks YT

[@araghon007]

Took a while for youtube to DLSS it up from 360p, hasn't it

[@caloss2]

@@araghon007 A thing YT does sometimes is show the video at full resolution so you hit publish, and it suddenly drops down to 360p again it's a real pita lol

[@the_zens]

Well it seems that this video is KZbin's HD processing biggest challenge yet.

[@CMWinter]

What is the thought process behind uploading at 3.30am UK time? Surely that makes no sense in regards to your demographic. I was under the impression 5pm/6pm UK is generally a good time for dropping content. Though, you may be trying to hit a dry period that will allow the video to linger on sub feeds for longer. Super curious to your thoughts.

[@FoddyFogHorn]

He’s probably doing some experiment he’ll talk about later.

[@irldoge2936]

Well the DLSS update for RDR2 like JUST launched, and since the video hasn't processed yet I'll bet you he stayed up all night making it and released it as soon as he was done haha

[@jf6785]

The UK is far from his biggest demographic

[@CMWinter]

@@jf6785 Implying 7pm - 10pm on a Thursday is prime-time for America.

[@irldoge2936]

@Boat Bro it takes more than a couple hours to fully plan, write, record, and edit a video. The implication is obviously that he's been working on it since he's gotten a chance to get his hands on it, and 2 days seems a reasonable amount of time to have him continually working and then finishing up very late at night just to get it done. Digital Foundry covers this content full time with several people on staff and they don't even have a video up yet. In terms of media coverage, yeah, the update just launched.

[@airbornez602]

Philips : the background trees are pixelated Me : Damn those trees look realistic WTH is he even talking about 😂😂

[@OutlawedPoet]

They look awful. You must be watching this on a phone and you've only played the game on console and can't notice how truly awful the game looks. The trees in general in this game are blurry as all hell, have very low res textures, and the leaves have trails, which is actually pretty hard to spot, but is still there nonetheless.

[@kmfhazard]

@@OutlawedPoet it's a very hard thing to spot and a very strange hill to die on. not to mention, strange to call entire game "ugly" for, but what do I know I'm just a console user

[@AVerySillySausage]

11:23 Came to the same conclusion as well. On my 1440p monitor I found using DSR 4k and choosing 4k in game, then running DLSS Balanced or Performance was that magic sweet spot. Game just look straight up better. The benefits of DLSS in this game are still way more noticeable than the downsides compared to TAA. The immediate image quality is noticeably better the moment you enable DLSS. I think it's just because this game's TAA is designed around running at 4k. I'm sure if I had a 4k display, the native would just look better and the TAA wouldn't be so blurry.

[@emma6648]

Uhh can you explain better

[@emma6648]

Pls and thanks

[@AVerySillySausage]

@@emma6648 First off, the game's TAA was obviously optimised to work with a 4k render resolution. So the game just looks very blurry with TAA when you don't have a 4k display. DLSS does not have the same horrible blur affect and looks much sharper than TAA when running below 4k. DLSS does have it's own downside, there is noticeably more aliasing and temporarily artefacts in certain areas. Overall, the look is better(assuming below 4k, I actually have since got a 4k display and just running native TAA looks best). I also found on my old 1440p display that getting the render resolution above 960p(the highest available by default) does a lot to negate the downsides of DLSS. The only way to get above 960p render res on a 1440p monitor using DLSS is to trick the game into thinking you have a 4k monitor. To do this you enable DSR in Nvidia Control panel, that gives you the option of choosing a 4k resolution which the Nvidia drive downscales to 1440p. After enabling DSR, I went into RDR2 menu and can now pick up 4k output from the menu. I can then enable DLSS and the performance mode which uses a 1080p render res. The end result is solid performance and a game that looks probably the best you can get it on a 1440p screen. I hit dimishing returns raising the DLSS quality above performance, and the performance penalty wasn't worth it. Note, I find that now I have an actual 4k display, it is clear to see the increase in quality as going up each DLSS mode, as previously mentioned I also think TAA now looks better than DLSS with a 4k screen so I don't bother with it. This backs up my initial point, the TAA was designed to look best at 4k.

[@ChisponGroxo]

Need some DLSS to watch this video.

[@korterkaks]

3h later the video is still in 360p so it's impossible for me to enjoy how good or bad the upscaling is waaaaaah :(((( Edit: Now 4h later and we've reached 720p boys!! This I can almost watch. I guess Philip didn't do some sick joke of actually making the whole vid in 360p to troll us.

[@xenotone3284]

My boy Philip making vids on par with DF. Awesome stuff.

[@Jofoyo]

Hard to tell on KZbin, but I'll take my best guess on what's going on when Philip talks about "checkerboard transparency". I can only make assumptions based on my experience with UE4, but going off that, developers tend to use temporal anti aliasing to dither objects into their surroundings, rather than using standard translucency. This fixes a lot of shortcomings of standard translucency methods, with foliage, this is mostly to solve overdraw. Overdraw happens when a pixel is drawn multiple times over a single frame, which happens when two or more translucent objects are stacked behind one another, with scenes containing a lot of translucent objects, like grass and leaves, it can absolutely kill performance. With dithered translucency, each pixel is only drawn once. It also opens up other options for translucent materials. One issue with traditional transparent shading models, is that it is very taxing to draw things like shadows overtop, and generally has a lot of artifacting issues. However, as it is a dithering effect, it doesn't actually make materials transparent, but rather draws every other pixel of a mesh, which only provides the illusion of the material being transparent, and when viewed upclose, or on low res monitors, can break down. Again though this is only a guess.

[@MLWJ1993]

You hit the nail on the head though. That's exactly what's going on (& has been since the introduction of RAGE). The alternative to this method is awful performance or bad graphics, something fans wouldn't be happy about either 😆

[@OutlawedPoet]

@@MLWJ1993 Bad graphics? The game already looks terrible.

[@MLWJ1993]

@@OutlawedPoet Let's just put it at, completely unshaded for transparent textures in that case.

[@nootinshootin7720]

POV: You are trying to find a comment that isn’t related to the video being 360p

[@ruijikisu]

i use quality, and i feel like at worst it looks exactly like native with TAA and at best it makes the artifacts almost disappear, im overall happy with the implementation

[@TheGoncas2]

RDR2 is one of the most beautiful and photorealistic games ever made, and there's a reason it still runs acceptably. DLSS wouldn't fix all the trickery, like checkerboarding, diddering, etc, that RDR2 uses to run well. RDR2 then uses a very specific TAA implementation to resolve those artifacts, but a general DLSS can't keep up with that specificity.

[@araghon007]

@NelyL It's not a poor implementation of DLSS, rather just Rockstar not disabling the TAA-specific trickery when using DLSS

[@OutlawedPoet]

Yeah, Red Dead Redemption 2 is so photorealistic that it makes me experience the world as if I was half-blind! It really is quite blurry, huh.

[@Easterhands]

"Best looking game that I hate looking at" THANK YOU!!! No one ever talks about this. I cannot stand how this game looks in many cases. DLSS at 4k was unimpressive IMO, mainly due to the aggressive sharpness changes when you move the camera. I haven't tried running at DSR resolutions though

[@Saffy1]

People complaining about 360p When I use DLSS to upscale video quality to 4k

[@miweneia]

rdr2's TAA is so god-awful, I ended up playing it at 4k in cinematic 35fps vs 1080p 110fps (also im cpu capped anyway)

[@xXx_Baba-Smoker_xXx]

as a console player, I have played at 1080p at 30fps and it was fine.

[@slavbot6938]

@@xXx_Baba-Smoker_xXx as a member of pc masterrace, unjokingly 30fps makes me nauseaus and drunk, it hurts my brain

[@XXXLaurel]

@@xXx_Baba-Smoker_xXx I agree with the other guys statement, i remember being used to play at even 24fps and thinking it was fine, i played on my PS4 after years and years of not turning it on and i had to stop an hour later and ran to the bathroom because i legit felt like puking, so i believe it's a question of adapting, but clearly the higher the fps the better for your eyes.

[@Sinoops]

There are some graphic tricks you can use to make the TAA look SIGNIFICANTLY better without going up to 4k. 1. Use Nvidia sharpening with noise reduction 2. Use TAA on Medium. For some reason TAA on High is much blurrier than the Medium setting. Seriously it's a night and day difference. I play on these settings at 1440p and it looks great. It looks better than DLSS Quality upscaled to 1440p in my opinion. It's just as sharp without all the shimmering, ghosting, and checkerboarding.

[@MrMeanh]

@@XXXLaurel In the 90s I was used to gaming at a "smooth" 15-20 fps on PC in some games, these days anything below 60 (or 50 if I have VRR enabled) feels horrible. Oh, and playing Final Fantasy 7 Remake on my PS4 pro was horrible (and the last game I played on it) since I´ve gotten so used to 60+ fps on PC.

[@JavonAnonimni]

So now we can either watch in 480p or 2160p60fps. KZbin works in mysterious ways.

[@KonradGM]

rdr2 is the only game where i fel it is contantly running at 50% the base resolution but the game tells you it runs at 100%

[@PlasmaCS2]

3 years later running rdr2 on a modded in dlss version 3.8 and it looks stunning, sharp, no fizz, no aliasing.

[@raff1944]

ah yes, let me compare 4k gameplay on this 360p video

[@paliszarok]

"philips" monitor, nice one philip! 👍

[@What-ez6im]

When your phone isn't even 1080p and the youtube video is 480p, I cant tell the difference XD

[@quantum5661]

you get 480p? im watching 18 minutes after you and i only get 360p.

[@rayhaanomar1200]

5 hrs later and it is still 480p

[@fxzn]

when i first saw the video i clicked and it was 360p, so i thought i would wait. about 30 minutes later i come back and its 1080p, but i have a 4k monitor and philip usually uploads in 4k, so i thought i would wait some more. 1 hour later, it dropped back down to fucking 720p wth??

[@RetroPlus]

6:32 "Until I upgrade to windows 10 again" Savage

[@sacb0y]

Silly.

[@AEleven]

Is it supposed to be in 360p for over 2 hours? I'd actually say not to remove the video from the channel if this was unintentional, it could prove an interesting experiment to see how long it takes to process the HD version. Put a warning in the title.

[@GurtMan100]

Current max is 720p

[@ViperSurf]

@@GurtMan100 it's 4k now, so we good 😅

[@219SilverChoc]

i can watch at 144p, 240p, no 360p, 480p, 720p at 30fps aand 4k 60fps great video, il defiantly try and re-watch it later.

[@KillahMate]

DLSS is _clearly_ not being implemented properly here. As you say, for some reason Rockstar is using DLSS on an image that's already been checkerboarded, and while DLSS is doing what it can, when starting with a subpar base image there's only so much that can be done. So I'm thinking... maybe it's a bug? We should maybe give them a few weeks to iron out the implementation details?

[@jackbequick]

I got a new gpu around 6 months ago, a 3060, my first "RTX" graphics card, and one of the first games I went to play was RDR2, I turned on DLSS and was immensly dissapointed, holy heck "that looks awful". The hair in particular was something I couldn't stomach and as I was in fact CPU limited it didn't provide a significant enough performance uplift for me to even consider using it. It's 100% on rockstar, as turning antialiasing off completely shows just how terrible the engine renders the game. RDR2 needs TAA to look at least "ok" because it blurs it to nothingness where you can't notice the shimmering.

[@darthlemon]

You should try the DLSS 3.5.1 update, that fixes a lot of the issues I had and semi-fixes the hair.

[@menadobe]

Dlss3 work on rtx 3000series?​@@darthlemon

[@Manupaya24]

I'm running rdr2 on a 4k monitor currently. On native I average around 45 fps and had the same idea. I could render the game at a higher resolution and use DLSS to internally render at native. But the only way I found of doing this is by creating DSR factors on nvidia control panel, and the factors that aren't x4 all look terrible as there isnt a 4:1 correspondence between the pixels. And since DLSS disables the resolution scaler inside the game I'm left with no other choices, how did you manage in particular?

[@zeegobrazy5879]

Cant believe I just watched a almost 13 min vid about things ive never heard about/confused tf outta me since i play on console and i still enjoyed it

[@televisionandcheese]

Been an hour and it's still 360p..... Did you do this on purpose Philip??

[@TheAlienpope]

The fizzy blurry effect is indeed a way for them to render more stuff. You can also see the same method in a lot of Ubisoft games, very obvious in older assassins creed games for example. I don't like the effect either, and i try and avoid effects like that in games i make. But i can understand why some studious sometimes feel forced to use them.

[@araghon007]

Well, in this case it's a way to render transparency in rendering pipeline that very much dislikes transparency, but yeah

[@ViperSurf]

I'm confused, been an hour and yet its still 360p 😕

[@fpshooterful]

GREAT REVIEW! I am loving DLSS so far with the combination of HUB-optimized settings.

[@meyomix2816]

360p gang riise up

[@Zhaopow3]

ya the game looks good to me what is he talking about

[@KezieBeVibin]

Really enjoying this resolution. Helps me appreciate the DLSS

[@pigydog123]

"the human eye cant see anything past 360p 24fps" -me

[@Cyrex64]

Man This game is the one that needed dlss most but it only taken them 3years

[@vik1450]

I watched almost 1 minute before I realised that the video isn't supposed to be pixelated. Thanks youtube for the 360p.

[@tharsis]

As a graphics developer, the 'fizz transparency' or dithered transparency is 100% a method for speed. There are two main rendering methods in graphics, forward and deferred. Forward is the standard render everything in a row, while deferred renders details such as the colours and normals first to their own textures, then uses those textures to render in the lights. Forward rendering can handle only a small number of lights, mainly because as you render things, you apply lighting as you render it, which can become very wasteful if something is in front of what you just rendered. Deferred meanwhile only renders lighting on the final pixels, meaning it can handle thousands of lights easily, something that makes it very handy for Rockstar's open worlds. The downside of deferred rendering is that it flat out cannot do transparencies - each pixel can only have a single 'depth', and if you used the window's depth or ignored it, then that pixel could be lit strangely either way (Either the window will look like it's lit from a light hitting the objects behind, or the objects behind look like they're being hit by the light actually hitting the window). There are two ways to work around that - render transparencies using forward rendering after the fact and combine the results - which is what Doom 2016 and other modern FPS games do - or use dithered transparency, where you render it as if it's opaque but then skip pixels in a given pattern, skipping more pixels the more transparent it is. Depending on your antialiasing solution, you might be able to hide these dithered pixels to a degree, but it's not easy. Rockstar went for the second option, as given the sheer density of foliage, hair and windows, you'd take an absurd performance hit rendering a good portion of the screen using forward rendering again. Easier to render everything as if it were opaque and get all the bonus lighting info, then just skip bits of it and hope your antialiasing and other post processing effects hides the pixellation for you (It doesn't).

[@OutlawedPoet]

I miss forward rendering. No sad excuses for AA like TAA which require you to render at 4k to look halfway decent. Just MSAA and sharp, beautiful images.