GTR2 and Downsampling with NVIDIA DSR
I've never played around with DSR before but after seeing some videos and getting to understand what's really happening I can see how it might be a really good way to improve the graphical clarity of GTR2.
But I just tried it and (1) unless I use Borderless Gaming the image is larger than the screen can fit, and (2) if I use Borderless Gaming to shrink it down to my screen size then the mouse positioning gets all wonky and I can't properly click the right things.
Edit: Change the resolution of Windows itself to 4K after enabling DSR in NV Control Panel, change the Scale to 100% (otherwise mouse doesn't track properly), and then borderless windowed mode will just start working normally for GTR2.
Has anyone done this before? Any tips and tricks?
Edit: Okay, I can see it working in fullscreen mode. Hard to tell the difference to be honest between 4K-to-1440p vs 1440p-native-with-aa-tweaks. One thing I think I notice is mirrors look much better when downsampling I'm assuming because they're rendering at a higher resolution with dsr.
Here's the video that got me down the DSR rabbit hole:
Sparse Grid Super Sampling Anti Aliasing for Transparent Surfaces
Did you try SGSSAA? It blurries the image slightly, but it is the best way to get rid of aliasing of transparent surfaces in gMotor on nVidia. Slightly higher quality can be achieved via my fork of DXVK, but it requires very recent hardware and a bit tricky setup.
That said DSR or SSAA and similar approaches have advantages - sharper, clearer image, so indeed it has advantages :) My guess it is more of a personal preference, I do not like aliased gridlines and fences, and in my experience only SGSSAA gets rid of that.
-The Iron Wolf
Image Scaling vs Downsampling
Image Scaling, from what I'm seeing, takes a low resolution image and upscales it to a high resolution image.
What we want, because GTR2 is so easy on GPUs these days, is to take a high resolution image and downscale it to our native resolutions: When you do it this way, the GPU has more image information to work with behind-the-scenes and so it can produce a better lower resolution image than, say, trying to anti-alias over that lower resolution image.
But it may depend on the game and just how much benefit you get might be more or less depending on a lot of variables.
I noticed when I upgraded to 1440p that I no longer needed anti-aliasing enabled in Far Cry 3, for example, I wasn't noticing jaggies anywhere. So, it seemed I could get more FPS by disabling AA.