SMOOTH OPERATIONS

Nvidia has a new antialiasing system

ELDER SCROLLS Online, which was originally launched in 2014, will be the first game to benefit from Nvidia’s latest piece of wizardry: Deep Learning AntiAliasing ( DLAA). It’s a development of the existing DLSS (Deep Learning Super Scaling) system. At its most basic, DLAA is DLSS without the upscaling, instead, the AI concentrates entirely on anti-aliasing. It employs the Tensor cores found in Nvidia’s RTX 2000, and 3000 series graphics cards, so you’ll need one of those.

There are various ways to remove the jaggles, all cost processing power, and hence frame rates. One method is Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA), which combines pixel data from previous frames with the current frame. It works well but doesn’t always handle motion effectively, leading to a ghosting or smearing effect. DLAA uses AI to track motion, lighting changes, and sharp edges to produce a cleaner image, and minimize any ghosting.

While DLSS offers higher resolutions with minimal performance loss, DLAA does the opposite, with better image quality at native resolutions, but incurring a performance loss. It works well with older games that can be comfortably run at high frame rates with processing power to spare—switch on DLAA and it can be used to bump up the image quality. Since it is based on existing DLSS technology, DLAA should be easy to implement on any game with DLSS support, offering another graphics option to play with.