▷ Nvidia dsr what it is and what it is for

One of the most interesting innovations that Nvidia introduced with the Maxwell architecture is a feature called Dynamic Super Resolution or DSR. This DSR technology enables a fast GPU to deliver improved image quality on a lower resolution screen. Nvidia announced it as a means to get 4K quality on a 2K screen.

Since most PC gamers today have monitors with a resolution of 1920 × 1200, DSR can become a very popular feature among PC gamers. In this article we explain how DSR works and what benefits it brings.

What is Nvidia DSR and how it improves image quality

In chart generation, antialiasing is one of many methods to address a fundamental problem. Graphics cards try to represent objects with all kinds of contours, from diagonal lines to curved surfaces and complex and irregular shapes, but the final images should be assigned to a regular, fixed grid of square pixels. This is less than ideal, the human eye does a spectacular job of pattern recognition, so we tend to look at jagged edges and tracking effects caused by mapping jagged shapes to a regular array of pixels. Today's graphics card control panels and game settings menus are full of antialiasing options aimed at solving this problem. The various methods generally represent different sets of tradeoffs between image quality and performance.

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Supersampling (SSAA) is the gold standard for antialiasing methods in terms of image quality, and is widely used in offline rendering by users like Pixar. However, the performance impact is quite drastic: 4X supersampling generally takes four times as many resources for rendering. Graphics cards used to offer a supersampling option on their control panels, but SSAA has fallen out of favor as more efficient AA methods like multisampling have become more popular.

With the abundant power offered by current GeForce cards, Nvidia has decided to once again expose an extra quality rendering mode. DSR is not supersampling, but it is quite related. Supersampling involves taking multiple samples from different locations within the same pixel and combining them to obtain a higher fidelity end result. Proper supersampling can sample from anywhere within a pixel, and the best routines can use a rotated grid or quasi-random sample pattern to achieve better results.

Oddly enough, Nvidia's DSR really tries to render a scene at a higher resolution and shrink it to fit the target screen. If you ask DSR to play a game at 3840 × 2160 pixels when the target screen is 1920 × 1080, then the result should be similar to what you would get from a 4X supersampling.

The benefits are the same, additional sample information improves every pixel, not only smooths the edges of objects, but also overexploits texture information, shading effects, it works. The impact on performance is the same, too. The GPU will work as it would when rendering on a 4K screen, perhaps slightly slower due to the overhead caused by reducing the image to the target resolution.

To get the DSR down gracefully from high resolutions, Nvidia uses a 13-touch Gaussian filter. This downscaling filter is likely to be quite similar to the filters used to scale videos from higher resolutions, such as when displaying 1080p video on a 720p screen. The fact that this filter uses 13 taps, or samples, is a clear indication of how it works: it samples not only from within the target pixel area, but also from outside the pixel boundary. This size reduction filter will make images look blurry or slightly softer, giving them a more cinematic look. The effect is similar to the filters that AMD used in its old CFAA scheme or, more recently, to the kernel employed by Nvidia's own TXAA technique.

Some PC gamers seem to have a strong negative reaction to anything that reduces the sharpness of on-screen images, which is probably one of the reasons AMD unfortunately no longer offers CFAAs. The images produced by the DSR filter convey a feeling of solidity and consistency that seems very pleasant.

This ends our article on Nvidia DSR what it is and what it is for, we hope it has clarified all your doubts about this new technology. Remember that you can share it with your contacts on social networks so that it can help more users.