Even the biggest naysayers agree: Transformer-based DLSS4 is a huge win for game upscaling

There’s a subreddit for everything, so it shouldn’t surprise that there’s one dedicated specifically to hating on Temporal Anti-Aliasing. The bit that should surprise, instead, is that these folks agree that DLSS4 is a real showstopper in terms of image quality and a big win for Nvidia.

I’m not completely sold on AI-based thingamajigs just yet, but when the good folks from r/FuckTAA say DLSS4 is good, you know you need to stop and hear what they’ve got to say. Context first, though: this particular subreddit is unified behind a singular and somewhat reasonable purpose: the users’ extreme dislike of Temporal Anti-Aliasing. This dislike of TAA stems from various sensible arguments: TAA is blurry, reduces motion clarity, and makes things look like absolute mush on lower resolutions. And, since DLSS is at its core a kind of TAA, it’s a given that these same problems would extend to it, too. Can DLSS4 be such a big deal regardless of these concerns, then? As it turns out, the answer is a yes.

Even people who dislike TAA like what DLSS4 is doing

Even though Cyberpunk 2077 is the only game that officially supports DLSS4 at this time, extracting the pertinent upscaler files from its installation folder is beyond simple nowadays. This is important because you can then use the pertinent DLSS.dll file to replace old, outdated versions of DLSS in virtually any other game that supports DLSS 2.0 or newer. Testing stuff out at your own pace, then, is totally trivial, and you can inject the fancy new DLSS4 into a game such as Red Dead Redemption 2, which suffers from excessively blurry TAA by default.

There’s some fiddling about to be done with all the different DLSS rendering presets, but Nvidia’s latest version of the upscaler is a success almost across the board. In games tested by the r/FuckTAA audiences (Red Dead Redemption 2, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and Cyberpunk 2077, for the most part), DLSS4 is showing massively improved motion clarity and a reduced inclination for oversharpening. There is a performance cost attached to it, but even DLSS Performance now looks downright excellent compared to what older builds of DLSS looked like.

One huge caveat is that DLSS4 appears to dislike vegetation for whatever reason. Since it is kind of important in video games, this will likely be resolved as Nvidia continues updating and optimizing the tech. Still, it’s worth remembering that it’s not quite perfect just yet.

In terms of AMD’s response to what Nvidia’s been doing as of late, stuff’s happening on that front as well. Last year’s FSR 3.1 updates have been followed by semi-cheeky hints as to what FSR 4.0 may or may not be. Honestly, it’s looking very good indeed, but even FSR 4 will be playing second fiddle to DLSS at this point, all the while having to rely on AI cores all of its own. In an ideal world, AMD would be parrying Nvidia’s cutting-edge stuff left and right, but it is what it is, and it’s good to see FSR trucking along no matter what state it’s in.

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