Red Dead Redemption 2 - DLSS's's Biggest Challenge Yet

360p probably isn't the most optimal way to be viewing this. I'm going to wait for YouTube to process this...

THANK YOU for showing DLSS with actual footage instead of stills. Every damn video I see about it just shows stills, which of course does a great job of hiding every artifact present in DLSS. I don't think this is malicious, just short sighted. AI upscaling for stills is quite good (as you know haha), so seeing how it does with moving subjects is a lot more useful. Great video. DLSS is still really fucking good, but I just hate that so many people think it's perfect and fail to point out the flaws.

Youtube could use some DLSS for it's 360p videos

Plot twist, Philip uploaded in 360p just to mess with everyone.

Clicked on the video so fast that youtube hasn't processed higher resolution than 360p. Hilarious. I'll be back later.

Wow I am here so early that the only quality option available is 360p

this is the longest ive ever seen a video stay at 360p for

We need DLSS to upscale this video from 360p

I'm honestly just here for 2kliksphilip's voice.

6:34 "so until I upgrade(???) to Windows 10 again..."? uhmmmm heavy shade there Phil

So basically the game is designed with TAA in mind with checkerboard rendering and temporal upscale and DLSS is just a slap on and doenst produce good results with all the trickery rockstar did with the renderer. All the flickery stuff properly comes because the game is still rendering in a checkerboard pattern

shows 1440p quality me watching at 360p on a 1080p monitor: mmmmm, the details

DLSS would certainly be useful for watching right now :P

Me: "I just wanna play RDR2 at above 60fps." Phillip: "The trees are too pixilated."

The fact this video's quality settings just jumps from 480p straight to 2160p. My poor Internet.

Some experience in game dev here: Any level of transparency is very expensive, none more expensive then the most accurate method, Alpha Blending, when you simply add the colors into the scene. Not only is it the most expensive type of rendering, but it can't occlude objects to force things behind it to unload, and it's accuracy in even modern engines is poor, as render order is solved per-object, rendering it very inaccurate for freeform 3D spaces. This is surprisingly still untouched territory in the modern era. The Dreamcast had hardware support for transparency on a per-vertex level, while modern Unity/Unreal Engine still relies on object positions and sort distance. The other methods of solving for transparency are rather straightforwards, Alpha Clipping & Hashed. Alpha clip is simply having a pixel either visible or not, so when it attempts to draw a part of the geometry it just doesn't and will attempt to render what's behind it. Hashing is a little more complicated, and what RDR2 seems to be doing. You take either of the above methods and test for transparency in passes, solving for so much each frame and building onto the result in the following frames. This can be masked by TAA but looks extremely poor regardless for real-time rendered games, albeit it can be solved with higher resolutions when the pixels are cheaper to throw out.

God, thank you so much for talking about these issues, Philip. My friends never acknowledged that they exist in the game and they called me crazy for thinking it's either fuzzy or blurry at times.

7:30 "YouTube likes to crush details such as these" Sure does!

Hmm, so since the game engine can't handle transparencies well, the game's TAA was built around that issue so that it looks blurrier than it should, while on the upside hiding checkerboard artifacts on hair and trees at lower resolutions. DLSS, while resolving more detail, wasn't built to hide these artifacts found specifically in the RAGE engine, so it ends up looking worse sometimes.

I cannot imagine how much work was done for this video. You are crazy man, best DLSS video so far.