DLSS 2.0 vs TAA: No Denoising Filter?
Amid Evil doesn’t seem to feature a (not an effective one at least) denoising filter for ray-tracing from what I can tell. The smoothening is performed by either TAA (temporal AA) or DLSS 2.0. It’s important to note that while DLSS is an upscaling technology, TAA is simply an accumulation filter, and therefore, it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. Overall, DLSS Quality is the best option, although it does result in a tiny pit of pixelation if you look closely. In this particular shot, TAA doesn’t look as smooth due to the increased noise, and the slight loss in detail actually acts in favor of DLSS Quality. The performance and ultra-performance modes, however, see nearly as much and more loss in detail than TAA, respectively.
In this comparison, TAA gets rid of the most noise, but at the same time, there’s a substantial loss in detail. Note the mountains in the distance and the grating in the upper left section of the screen. In the case of the latter, part of the thinner meshes are completely erased. In terms of texture sharpness, only the ultra-performance preset of DLSS is worse than TAA. Both quality and performance retain more detail than TAA.
In the above shot, TAA actually looks better than both DLSS quality and performance, and the loss in detail is less pronounced. Furthermore, DLSS suffers from hallucinations here, with the edges of the ledges getting brightened. The same isn’t observed with TAA or the lack of any AA algorithm. Upon further investigation, it was found that these artifacts only occur at certain angles, and only with DLSS:
It appears that if there are some illuminated edges in some part of the screen, DLSS reconstructs some additional edges with the same glow.
You can find the original uncompressed shots here.
Impact of Different Ray Counts on Quality
Continued on the next page…
