AMD Thinks NVIDIA DLSS is not Good Enough; Calls TAA & SMAA Better Alternatives

Recently, two big titles received NVIDIA DLSS support, namely Metro Exodus and Battlefield V. Both these games come with NVIDIA’s DXR (DirectX Raytracing) implentation that at the moment is only supported by the GeForce RTX cards. DLSS makes these games playable at higher resolutions with much better frame rates, although there is a notable decrease in image sharpness. Now, AMD has taken a jab at DLSS, saying that traditional AA methods like SMAA and TAA “offer superior combinations of image quality and performance.”

Intel Core i9-9900KFC CPU Listed: For them Chicken Dinners

NVIDIA: Ray Tracing Will Be Added to every single upcoming game; Unity Engine Support Coming Soon

NVIDIA: DLSS Quality will get Better With Time

Team red didn’t stop there and went on to call the AI-based antialiasing technique subpar that causes image artifacts due to a harsh sharpening and upscaling algorithm. A while back at the company’s CES keynote, Adam Kozak claimed that AMD might come up with something similar to NVIDIA’s DLSS tech for the newly announced 7nm Radeon Vega VII GPU.

Team red didn’t stop there and went on to call the AI-based antialiasing technique subpar that causes image artifacts due to a harsh sharpening and upscaling algorithm. A while back at the company’s CES keynote, Adam Kozak claimed that AMD might come up with something similar to NVIDIA’s DLSS tech for the newly announced 7nm Radeon Vega VII GPU.

Nvidia DLSS-like thing can be done with a GPGPU-like approach with our GPU

Adam Kozak

However, it looks like it won’t be happening anytime soon as AMD doesn’t seem quite impressed by DLSS. AMD’s director of marketing said the following regarding the same:

In the end, we are looking at the methods that are going to be widely implemented in today’s games, and that run exceptionally well on Radeon VII. So our priority is going to be looking at SMAA and TAA and not proprietary technologies.

Sasa Marinkovic

There had been speculations that AMD might leverage WindowsML or DirectML to develop an open-source, upscaling technique similar to DLSS for its Radeon Vega VII graphics card. After hearing the AMD marketing head’s reaction to DLSS, it’d be safe to that the company isn’t looking to emulate the proprietary GeForce tech anytime soon.

We benchmarked Metro Exodus yesterday with and without DLSS and found it to be quite useful at 4K, especially with raytracing or RTX enabled. You can check the results here:

• Metro Exodus PC Performance Review
• Metro Exodus: NVIDIA RTX Raytracing and DLSS Performance