The reason that DLSS doesn't exist in Elite: Dangerous is because the game and it's engine (even 4.0's) is old and NVIDIA probably won't foot the bill for a more difficult integration than was required for F1 Manager or JWE2, which already exposed motion vector information natively. Frontier won't, maybe even can't, do it on their own as the cost vs. effort of adding it is the barrier.
If they cannot be bothered to add official support for FSR2 to JWE2 (a newer and more precient product), a game that already has a recent version of DLSS. They aren't likely to add DLSS to
Elite: Dangerous, where it would take far more work, solely because of the effort invovled (which, without more active support from NVIDIA would be the same as integrating FSR2). Elite: Dangerous' problematic UI middlewear (something they've been struggling with for most of ED's life as
Scaleform was discontinued in
2018 mid-2017) may also be a factor.
Given Frontier's financial situation and the technical hurdles involved with this incarnation of the engine, it's entirely understandable that DLSS doesn't meet the bean counters' risk vs. reward/investment vs. return threshold.
Not really, I have seen how DLSS works, and the question would not be from old graphics card users but from new ones.
For example: I bought an RX 79xx XT but it works worse than some RTX 4070 with DLSS enabled.
The only RX 7000 series part on Seam's hardware survey for last month is the 7900 XTX with 0.22%. Even if we assume that the 7900 XTX, 7900 XT, 7800 XT, and 7700 XT are currently selling well, and that the Elite: Dangerous Odyssey player base is skewed more heavily to higher-end GPUs, I would be astonished if more than 1-2% of Elite: Dangerous players will be using RX 7000 series parts by the end of the year. Whatever subset of that small fraction of the player base would complain about the addition of DLSS is not going to matter one whit to Frontier's bottom line.
JWE2 has DLSS, but officially no FSR, and there don't seem to be many complaint critical of DLSS' presence. Actually, I couldn't find any. I did find several complaints about the DLSS implementation (mostly bug reports regarding visual artifacts) from people using it, but no one saying it shouldn't exist. I found one thread asking for FSR where one of the two replies was seemingly angry about the lack of FSR, but that's about it.
What is a common complaint with ED is the lack of modern AA options:
Hi All! I used to play ED quite a bit a while back but took a break Pre-Odyssey. I picked up Odyseey yesterday and noticed that the Anti-Aliasing looks terrible. I'm assuming this has to do with the new lighting incorporated in Odyssey so I went back to Horizons and it looks like all the...
forums.frontier.co.uk
Hey, in the last top 20 issues status report we got (which happened in early October 2021, no updates since then), the anti-aliasing issue was discussed as Anti-Aliasing Not Working Correctly: Some changes will go in Update 7 or 8, with significant improvements, but a full anti-aliasing system...
forums.frontier.co.uk
I finally played the Odyssey tutorial today...and I almost immediately was thrown off by the horrendous aliasing issues present, which are especially bad while in motion. I refunded a game on Steam recently for the same reason (Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts 2) for much the same reason; the...
forums.frontier.co.uk
I understand all the efforts that the developers are making, I am sure that by giving time and support they will be able to recover after this difficult launch but there is one element that bothers me too much. The lack of Temporal Antialiasing. Now, I'm not a graphics fanatic and I think...
forums.frontier.co.uk
Anti Aliasing and HD Unexplorable plantes were the key points for the Elite Dangerous that never taken seriously, but with the odyssey, the game's graphics looks unprofessional because of the Anti Aliasing and not HD planets(Unexplorable). Frontier... PLEASE -With Respects, your dear players.
forums.frontier.co.uk
(On a related tangent, ED's AA issues mirror the problems that prompted TAA to become the default AA method for UE4 and pretty much everything else since:
https://de45xmedrsdbp.cloudfront.net/Resources/files/TemporalAA_small-59732822.pdf)
Because DLSS is essentially an advanced form of TAA, and they both depend on the same information being exposed by the game engine, DLSS almost always implies a TAA option (and TAA has no baggage associated with being a competitor's solution), which would go a long way toward addressing Elite: Dangerous' aliasing issues. The inclusion of DLSS and/or TAA would also imply the ability to mod-in FSR2 (JWE2 has FSR2 mods) as, again, they all use the same information to work.
The idea that it's customer resistance holding back integration of DLSS (or any other feature) is bizarre. Far more people would laud the inclusion of DLSS in
Elite: Dangerous than would complain about it.