IMO, VRS (variable rate shading), which is in all major GPU providers (NVidia, AMD, and even Intel iGPUs / Xe), provides the "upscaling-ish" performance gains that we want for the next generation.
Its much harder to see the difference between native and VRS.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/variable-rate-shading...
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Its not a "competitive" feature, because everyone is doing it. But it basically accomplishes the same thing: carefully upscaling results (2x2 instead of 1x1) in locations where the gamer probably won't notice.
Care to explain more or have some good resources where I can learn about it by myself?
Because that's where the difference gets important. If I compare to my PS4 Pro, many games "look" better because they drive the UI at full native resolution while using checkerboard rendering to keep the framerate up. The same game on my 970GTX will chug, drop frames or have all the text and UI look blurry because I need to drop the resolution.
If DLSS 2.0 fixes this issue, it's a massive improvement.
DLSS 2.0 is a great addition to that field, but it's far from being the only good option here. AMD has also done some things in this area, too, like Radeon Boost which was the idea of dynamically reducing resolution in response to player inputs, with the idea being if you're sitting still-ish you're OK sacrificing FPS for better quality, but as soon as you start whipping about you want the FPS more. Game engines also do similar things, and combined with temporal upscaling & antialiasing are quite compelling.
DLSS is also a rather heavy computation, taking 1-2 ms per frame on high end GPUs. That's a serious amount of processing power to put into a display and doing so makes it exclusive for that use. On the GPU those tensor cores can be used for other tasks when they're not doing DLSS.