DSR is a form os super sampling, the game is rendered at a resolution higher than the one displayed on the screen, this eliminates all jaggies and gives a great IQ.

As far as I know there is 1 console game that does this, this is one of the Lego games on the PS4 (I can't recall which one) it renders at 1920*1200 and downscale it to 1920*1080, this makes a super sharp image!

Now, going all the way to 4K then scaling back to 1080p is for IQ freaks and this should not be expected on any currently shipping console (or even 98% of PCs out there).... and while it gives you some extra information in the final image, this is by no means a replacement for 4k as you could render the image at "8k" then downscale it all the way to 4K and get an even better image (I would probably not waste ressources on this, but someone will do this one day, for sure).

Now early AA methods were simple super sampling, you would just select a multiplication factor in your video card drivers (it was never an option in the games graphics settings back then) then the image would be rendered at 2, 4, 6 or even 8 times the resolution you picked inside the game! the IQ was always great... but you ran into performance problems really fast.

I'll stick with FXAA until I get a GPU with more VRAM

super sampling is the oldest form of anti aliasing, it's also the best but most performance intensive one, which is why sooo many other forms of AA were conceived

It is like, process and render the game and then compress it to 1080p? Ending in you using more resources than on a 4k game but for a 1080p IQ? Isn't that the dumbest thing to do?
If you have HW resources to do that just do 4k native if not possible because of monitor then put the resources in effects. You can't make a pixel properly divide itself in 4 so it still will show the same pixel but shitted blurriness. Best AA is no AA and better resolution not the opposite.

I've tried out DSR in a few games, its pretty cool.

I think some people still don't get how this works.

Ok, a GPU renders pixels. If it costs a GPU 10% of its power to draw 2M pixels. It would cost the same GPU 40% of its power to draw 8M pixels. There is NO WAY AROUND THIS.

To anti-alias, certain parts of an image is selected for pixel additions. It could be just the edges of objects and stuff like that. This means that the GPU is still rendering more pixels, though these are pixels of a lower quality. This anti-aliasing pass can use anything between 2% to 8% of the GPUs power. Depending on the type of aliasing used.

If You have a lot of GPU muscle to spare, then super sampling (SSAA) means that you can render an 8M pixel image and and shrink it to fit on a 2M pixel screen. It would be near impossible to see any aliasing artifacts on such an image.

What Nvidia is offering, is a hardware solution in their GPUs that will take the image that the GPU renders and upscale the image (albeit very very well) to 4x its resolution (assuming you are starting from 1080p). This is what any upscale chip does. they may just not be using as many reference points per pixel.

Contrary to what and how they may want to make it sound, your GPU is just magically now able to render 4x the amount of total pixels for your benefit. Its just a GPU cost free method of AA. It would be equivalent to having something like FXAA but at no cost to the GPU which could let you use that gained power for something else.

As DonFerrari said its pretty pointless to use this.
This would only be useful if a game doesn't have aa implemented, and if it doesn't support aa forced by the driver.You also have to remember that downsampling might create some problems with HUD elements,if you want a clear picture just use SSAA.I remember playing Crysis AW with x16MSAA and there were still jaggies left, used x4SGSSAA and the jaggies disappeared completely, with the performance impact of x8MSAA.
The quality of SGSSAA at 1080p was so good that I had less jaggies than now that I play at 4k with SMAA(since I can't use anything more demanding.)

@Intrinsic: If you enable DSR, you are making the GPU render the game at said resolution, not upscaling the image to that resolution.

The Teach Report did a good article about it : http://techreport.com/review/27102/maxwell-dynamic-super-resolution-explored

Enabling DSR at 4K and downscaling the image to 1080p is actually more demanding than just rendering the image in 4K.

Yeah, as mentioned before, Nvidia's DSR is just a fancy marketing name for Super-sampling, a technique that has existed for many years.

As resolution increases, super-sampling types of AA (Including MSAA) will become obsolete in my opinion. We'll just need some post-AA to make some finishing touches on the image quality.

So you basically say "the higher the resolution the less need for AA" ?

Stop the newspaper presses! :)


Btw everyone can use that technique  google GeDoSaTo. The same guy that made all the PC DarkSouls fixes did this long before NVidia