NIS - when NVIDIA fixed what FDev wont.

[Sublime]

Fair point.

FSR they definitely did, since that's more an AMD API and doesn't even need a specific driver or graphics card (Pascal-based Nvidia cards will work with FSR), but I don't know about NIS.

It should. I believe NVidia stated that NIS is available on all games and GeForce GPUs.

 

[Lulzwhat]

So you switched to 1709x960p to get 60 fps? While you are normally running on 2560*1440? Then you think Nvidia performed a miracle?

You just set the driver to calculate 1.6 million pixels and not the original 3.6 million pixels. So this IS a smart thing to do when going into on-foot mode and get higher FPS. To credit Nvidia for this is silly.

(btw I play on 3440*1440 flying and on-foot 2560x1080 (rx 590))

Well, believe or not - i've tried downscaling with ingame methods, and it worst than NIS in image or FPS or both.
And i've never saw stable 60 on foot.
I dunno what is magic here, but it works.

 

[Morbad]

As the NVIDIA article states NIS has been in their drivers for over two years. I used it in Horizons on my 1080 Ti in conjunction with DSR to make up for the game's shoddy AA without sacrificing a lot of performance (in my case, rendering the game at 1824p internally via fractional in-game supersampling, scaling to 2880p, then downsampling back to the 1440p native resolution of my monitor with DSR and applying NVIDIA's sharpen filter with custom settings in the process to mitigate some of the blurriness introduced). Was convoluted, but looked good and ran well.

It's nice that they've updated it with a better scaling filter and made it more straightforward to use, but it's not going to be a radical change from the various options we've long had, nor is it going to perform miracles.

Well, believe or not - i've tried downscaling with ingame methods, and it worst than NIS in image or FPS or both.
And i've never saw stable 60 on foot.
I dunno what is magic here, but it works.

A better downscaler followed by a sharpen pass. It's extremely similar to the in-game FSR, but more soft and less grainy, unless you go overboard with the sharpening.

You can get even better AA by combining it with the in-game scaling, though there is a little overhead.

Fair point.

FSR they definitely did, since that's more an AMD API and doesn't even need a specific driver or graphics card (Pascal-based Nvidia cards will work with FSR), but I don't know about NIS.

Both FSR and NIS are essentially post process spatial image scalers that run in software. No proprietary hardware is required and any limitations are arbitrary ones. You can run either on essentially anything with 3rd party injectors.

 

[Lulzwhat]

As the NVIDIA article states NIS has been in their drivers for over two years.

There was no scaling, only sharpening part. And if you mean DSR - it's more for upscaling, not downscaling.

 

[Morbad]

There was no scaling, only sharpening part. And if you mean DSR - it's more for upscaling, not downscaling.

That's incorrect.

The feature prior to this update looked like this:

NVIDIA Support

nvidia.custhelp.com

The "GPU scaling" option would upscale to the native res of the panel (which could be combined with DSR resolutions and/or in-game scaling options) with a scaler that was generally higher quality than what most display panels had.

The main functional change with this update is a 6-tap software rather than a 5-tap (or 6-tap if you had a harware G-SYNC module) hardware scaler. The old GPU scaling and and image sharpening settings could do most of what the new NIS stuff can, even if it was somewhat less straightforward.

As for DSR, it doesn't matter what it's nominally intended for. It matters what I can do with it.

 

[Sakashiro]

You're missing the point there. It's like saying "Crutches should not exist because people should not limp in the first place"

You're missing the point that was in the part of the quote that you omitted:

"Upscaling is not a solution because it ruins readability of the HUD in cockpits."

Crutches occupy your hands in the act of walking, but when you need your hands for something else, you can lay the crutches down. Once activated, upscaling is active all the time, even in space where you don't need it because the frame rate is above 60fps already. You trade spatial for temporal resolution even when that makes no sense and gets in the way of playing the game.

Upscaling works better in games that render the HUD in a separate pass on top of the upscaled environment. Other games also have better anti-aliasing, which is another prerequisite to make FSR and NIS look good.

 

[Mogen Teras]

Makes me sad that we are still clamoring around spatial upscalers as a godsend even 7 months after EDO's launch because it's literally the only reliable way to improve the game's awful performance.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Makes me sad that we are still clamoring around spatial upscalers as a godsend even 7 months after EDO's launch because it's literally the only reliable way to improve the game's awful performance.

Nah, you can just spend a ton of money on a better graphics card. Fixed it for me... at a rather hefty price.

 

[RooksBailey]

I welcome all these new tools gamers have available to them to improve the performance of their favorite games. They are especially valuable during this time of tech shortages.

I don't know why the OP is saying that FDev "won't" fix the performance issues of the game when they have already addressed some of it in Update 8 and, according to the last live stream, the "performance, performance, performance" of Odyssey is all the team is focused on right now. We'll see how well FDev does with optimizing the game, but at a minimum, I give them credit for addressing the issue with gusto. I've experienced more than my share of devs who have released an unoptimized game with the strategy of "letting the hardware catch up to the software" - i.e., "We're not wasting time on optimizing the game; you're just going to have to upgrade your hardware to get a good framerate." FDev could have gone down that path ("It's next-gen! Too bad for those of you using last-gen hardware!!") but haven't.

 

[Stark1905]

apparently, NIS is not working on laptop with dynamic gpu

 

[Úlfhéðnar]

It should. I believe NVidia stated that NIS is available on all games and GeForce GPUs.

So since this means only Nvidia users can use it. It ain't any solution.

 

[Oztig]

Everything maxed out except Ambient Occlusion (it's on medium) and shadows (both on high)
Ingame scaling disabled
Resolution from nvidia list - 1709x960 (it appears in settings after enabling NIS, my native is 1440p)

Cheers for this - I get +20-30 FPS increase on planets - I'm using 85% (2176 x 1224 to get 1440p). Image quality is excellent.
Not sure how it compares with AMD thing - will do more experiments at the weekend, and post results.

Thanks for sharing this post - it wasnt something I was aware of. Wonder if it will work for RiftS, and if so, what I have to set stuff to?

 

[Rat Catcher]

I tried it, in my case it gave worse results tha runing the game native in 4k.
But, I'll have a proper play around later to see if it was (as expected) user error rather than the software itself.

Just to update.

Yes, it was user error! I had a read through Nvidia's article on this version of NIS and followed the instructions, yes it works, FPS is higher than native in 4K, but I need a proper play around to make my own mind up. I'm having fun seeing what looks best to me, thanks to the OP for bringing it to our attention.

 

[Oztig]

Something to bear in mind:

"
Because the upscaling in NVIDIA Image Scaling is performed by the GPU, and not within the game, software-based video capture methods will not record the upscaled gameplay at the target (native) resolution, but instead at the lower pre-upscaled resolution.

Screenshot and video capture of NVIDIA Image Scaling will therefore require special driver-level support; screenshots captured through GeForce Experience using Alt+F1 are supported now, and video capture support is coming soon. In the meantime, gamers can use a dedicated capture card such as Elgato 4K60 PRO MK.2 and Avermedia Live Gamer 4K.
"

 

[the100thmonkey]

FHD is pretty much gone by

Nonsense. FHD displays still make up more than two thirds of all displays, compared to just over 11% for 1440p and 2160p combined.

From the Steam Hardware Survey. And yes, that is a representative sample, unless you can think of a sound reason why the single biggest games platform in the world is not used by the majority of gamers.

Data from W3Schools also suggests that 1920x1080 is actually the second most popular resolution for computer displays, with 1366x768 actually accounting for just shy of a quarter of all displays as reported by internet browsers. This is 20% more common than 1080p, although these figures are likely dominated by machines whose primay purpose is not gaming.

 

[Ryox]

You're missing the point that was in the part of the quote that you omitted:

"Upscaling is not a solution because it ruins readability of the HUD in cockpits."

Crutches occupy your hands in the act of walking, but when you need your hands for something else, you can lay the crutches down. Once activated, upscaling is active all the time, even in space where you don't need it because the frame rate is above 60fps already. You trade spatial for temporal resolution even when that makes no sense and gets in the way of playing the game.

Upscaling works better in games that render the HUD in a separate pass on top of the upscaled environment. Other games also have better anti-aliasing, which is another prerequisite to make FSR and NIS look good.

I hear you. I can imagine how upscaling would create all sort of unexpected problems like yours.

In your case it's very problematic but I think it falls more into a "FDev bug" and upscaling shouldn't be blamed by itself. I totally agree with you, I also hope we could tailor the quality settings depending of "in ship" or "on foot" (but it's probably impossible because they often mix with each others). Or even better, FDev should simply fix cockpit rendering (bug tracker). (Edit : btw, I personally don't have this issue)

On the other hand, many people have more positive than drawbacks when using upscaling, so it's important that we don't discredit this tech.

 

[Ian Skippy]

Anyway, i'm pretty much against using image scaling. Devs really need to make sure their games run well at the resolutions the cards should be able to handle.

Thats an incredibly ludite viewpoint. Right now there are resolutions and graphic qualities possible that simply cannot be properly handled by any rig. This isn't new, studios have for decades included 'future proof' settings that would simply tank performance on any pc on launch. Take RDR2; it has a few settings that completely tank performance for marginal gains, just to give the option.

In the end its all about balance; how much visual quality do you lose for performance gains, and the other way around. DLSS is a technology where the trade-off is fairly simple: huge performance gains for neglible loss, or even sometimes quality gains. It is completely absurd to be 'against' something that does nothing but allow people to enjoy a better balance of performance and quality. Its like arguing you are against cars because "people should schedule better so they can arrive on time on their horse."

 

[Ryox]

I think it's important to keep in mind that many people have an "older" rig and cannot upgrade to better. For them upscaling is a way to keep playing modern games on their hardware.

 

[Ian Skippy]

Nonsense. FHD displays still make up more than two thirds of all displays, compared to just over 11% for 1440p and 2160p combined.

View attachment 275809

View attachment 275810

From the Steam Hardware Survey. And yes, that is a representative sample, unless you can think of a sound reason why the single biggest games platform in the world is not used by the majority of gamers.

Data from W3Schools also suggests that 1920x1080 is actually the second most popular resolution for computer displays, with 1366x768 actually accounting for just shy of a quarter of all displays as reported by internet browsers. This is 20% more common than 1080p, although these figures are likely dominated by machines whose primay purpose is not gaming.

When you look at what display gamers buy, 1440p is slowly becoming the standard. But it can be many years before its actually a majority. 4k is still very, very niche. Which makes sense because until a few years ago a decent GPU was able to push max settings on 1080p games around 60FPS, and nowadays these cards aim at 1440p. Its only extremely high-end cards that aim at 4k.

And unless you want/need a very large monitor, which demands 4k, its simple: a decent $200 monitor and $300 GPU gives you perfect 1440p performance, whereas you will need easily four times more for a great 4k experience. In short; 1080p is dominant but phasing out, 1440p is on the rise, 4k is on the distant horizon. Meanwhile most laptop users are on 1080p anyway, so a large chunk will stay there for years to come.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Thats an incredibly ludite viewpoint. Right now there are resolutions and graphic qualities possible that simply cannot be properly handled by any rig. This isn't new, studios have for decades included 'future proof' settings that would simply tank performance on any pc on launch. Take RDR2; it has a few settings that completely tank performance for marginal gains, just to give the option.

In the end its all about balance; how much visual quality do you lose for performance gains, and the other way around. DLSS is a technology where the trade-off is fairly simple: huge performance gains for neglible loss, or even sometimes quality gains. It is completely absurd to be 'against' something that does nothing but allow people to enjoy a better balance of performance and quality. Its like arguing you are against cars because "people should schedule better so they can arrive on time on their horse."

I'm not talking about edge cases for those with massive screens or monster cards. I'm talking about regular screens and cards. IE: A vast majority. Even more so, talking about myself. I don't want to use it. If my screen is 1080p and my card can do 1080p and most other games can run well on it, but another game doesn't, and it isn't doing anything special in terms of graphics, then its absoloutely on the devs to sort it out, i shouldn't have to suffer substandard graphics.

That's why i refused to play Odyssey until they improved performance or until i got a better graphics card. Yeah, i could get Odyssey to run somewhat ok most of the time, but it required really low settings and scaling to make it somewhat playable, and then, it meant in space, i was suffering much worse graphics just to experience planetary stuff.

I see nothing ludite about expecting devs to make performance better when its clearly not up to snuff at native resolution and i find your stance very strange.