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jonas21

It's only briefly mentioned, but NVIDIA's recurrent denoising autoencoder is pretty amazing.

https://research.nvidia.com/publication/interactive-reconstr...

Two Minute Papers did a nice explanation of it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjjTPV2pXY0

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Yes it's very nice. I think they went a bit too far with their deep learning anti aliasing solution DLSS though. Read somewhere here that AMD potentially had an algorithm that surpassed it in many metrics using no ML. Seems like that thing about holding a hammer for too long so everything starts looking like nails.

‘Potentially had an algorithm’ - if it is a potential algorithm, this implies it had not been sufficiently performant to work in practice, though.

Bad wording on my part, it's definitely in use. I dug up the context, it's discussed in the second top-level comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20698721

Also, DLSS was received rather poorly. The performance impact doesn't justify the increase in perceived quality, and the artifacts when it fails are pretty jarring.

I thought DLSS speeds up the rendering with RT ON.

In all games to date, it's better both in terms of perf and aesthetics to run with RTX disabled and TAA enabled. There's a bunch of blog posts and youtube videos like [1] about this.

There's a bit of a meme going around that DLSS stands for 'doesn't look so sharp'

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DOGA2_GETQ

> and aesthetics to run with RTX disabled

Did you mean to say "run with DLSS disabled"? RTX contains all the new features including ray tracing, which is not the same as DLSS. There are several games where many people feel they are indeed much better aesthetics-wise with RTX on, not off. At the very least it's a matter of preference, and not "better" in general to have RTX off.

I meant to say with RTX disabled. Turning on RTX (and let's call DLSS free at this point) costs a performance penalty that's equivalent to meaningfully upping resolution or AA settings without RTX. And people prefer the latter. This might change as games start making better use of RTX functionality, but this is where things are today.

For n=1 I've played Metro with RTX on lower settings and without RTX on higher settings, and I prefer without. I think realtime raytracing came out a hw generation too soon.

https://au.ign.com/articles/2019/04/17/what-is-ray-tracing-a...

https://www.techradar.com/au/news/we-tested-ray-tracing-in-c...

> And people prefer the latter

You prefer the latter. Many people prefer ray tracing on. In fact the main complaint online is about the cost of cards, very few people seem to contest that scenes where ray tracing is properly artistically used, have superior aesthetic quality to them and superior realism. (assuming that's what you mean, since you keep using the term "RTX" and it's unclear what you talk about, whether it's ray tracing or DLSS etc.)

And yet I cite 3 unrelated sources that all corroborate what I said with detailed analysis and you cite.. Opinion?

> assuming that's what you mean, since you keep using the term "RTX" and it's unclear what you talk about, whether it's ray tracing or DLSS etc.

I use the term the same way NVIDIA uses it. RTX is anything an RTX core accelerates. Still confused? I think that might have been the intention of their marketing team.

> very few people seem to contest that scenes where ray tracing is properly artistically used, have superior aesthetic quality

This is quantifiable bs. Ray tracing as a technique is superior to rasterisation, but only with sufficient flops. And the current generation of hardware does not yield that critical number. So we get 'ray tracing', but so subdued and limited that existing approaches just flat out look better and also perform better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuoER1DwYLY

Or if you want a more approachable comparison of RTX vs. not-RTX. consider Minecraft+RTX[1] vs. Minecraft+PTGI[2]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91kxRGeg9wQ

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2WqX6Iu6cU

You linked a performance analysis of RTX cards in Control, a general overview of ray tracing and how it applies to gaming and some youtube video from almost a year ago about DLSS not being implemented very well in one game (which has since been much improved).

None of these corroborate the idea of RTX effects being aesthetically inferior, or that this is a widely held opinion.

Consider watching these for an up-to-date take on the subject.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blbu0g9DAGA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG5NLl85pPo

I watched all these holywars as well, and I’m on OFF side too for a personal preference (framerate >> “realness”). But how disabling RTX corresponds to DLSS speed when RTX ON at all? It was nvidia’s main selling point that dlss makes rtx bearable by rendering in lower resolution and then upscaling via trained network. Which traditional AA can not at the ~~~same quality level.

Well, it's very good for still images, problem is, it doesn't work well on videos, since the way it works is not temporally consistent.

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