Investigating A New Technique To Eliminate/Reduce Shimmering While Maintaining Performance [NVIDIA only] [AMD Equivalent Tester Needed]

[=Karaya69=VikingSail]

Any veteran IL-2 player knows fiddling with the game settings to get less shimmering and make planes stand out more against the landscape/sky background is a tedious process, which often involves modifying the startup.cfg file to absurd parameters that don't even have any effect in the game.

 

Recently I have come across a potential new solution to get very good results without this tedious process. The solution is called NVIDIA DLDSR (Deep Learning Dynamic Super Resolution).

 

• To enable this feature you'll have to go to the nvidia control panel and find it on the "Manage 3D Settings" page. 
• Now you can change the in-game resolution setting to beyond the native resolution of your monitor.
• The tensor core in the GPU downscales the image back to the native resolution at a very minimal performance cost.
• Then you can play around with the smoothness slider to find the sweet spot between smooth&fluffy images but lacking sharpness, and sharp&crispy but with jaggy and protruding foliage.

 

From my testing this only works in the fullscreen mode, which means in the startup.cfg file you'll need to change the parameters involving fullscreen, not windowed mode. This equivalent to checking the "fullscreen" option in-game and tuning up the resolution beyond the monitor's native one.

[KEY = graphics]
	...
	...
	full_height = 1440
	full_width = 2560
	fullscreen = 1
	...
	...
	win_height = 1080
	win_width = 1920
[END]

(On my 1080p 144Hz monitor I let the GPU downscale the image from 1440p back to 1080p with a 20% smoothness filter setting)

 

I have also tried disabling MSAA all together - which is to many people a good option to make the target appear bigger/earlier. This saved me a couple of more frames so now the game actually renders at a higher resolution AND at a slightly higher framerate, resulting in 0 performance loss while providing a much smoother image, especially with hard edges like river banks, buildings and foliage backgrounds. 

 

Admittedly, disabling MSAA does decrease the sharpness a tiny bit. I'll have to investigate more into the differences in sharpness between no, 2x and 4x MSAA settings. Additionally I could also post some comparisons in terms of image quality and framerates.

 

AMD cards provide a similar feature called Virtual Super Resolution. I cannot test it on a AMD card right now. But it would be great if someone can give it a shot and post the results here.

[Wilhelm_Heidkamp]

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Showing results for 'dsr'. - IL-2 Sturmovik Forum (il2sturmovik.com)

[RossMarBow]

Its pretty widely accepted that higher resolutions make spotting hard - cause the dots are smaller
That msaa off makes spotting hard - cause theirs less to spot

 

So downscaling is basically the opposite of what you want to do to make spotting easier
Now maybe nvidias upscaling plus somehow fixes that idk

 

So what you doing is gonna make spotting a lot harder even if it does make the game look nicer overall 

Edited December 18, 2022 by RossMarBow

[=Karaya69=VikingSail]

thanks for the feedbacks.

although, I do still stand by my point made above. 

here's my argument. due to YT compression, make sure to set the video to 1440p, regardless of your display's resolution.

in case you want to download the original file: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qbrOgNFzrDJ1bNLimlLbzyM4LRes7Bne/view?usp=sharing

 

The funny thing is you can play a little game to see the difference: blind-pause at any second in the video. Chances are, either the middle or the right picture will show you a bigger, or darker, or sharper target, or a blob of black dots which represent the shape of a plane more, than the picture on the left.

 

 

left: native 1080p no DSR, MSAA x4.

middle: DL DSR 1440p, MSAA x2.

right: DL DSR 1440p, no MSAA or FXAA.

 

Test method:

offline quick mission, head to head engagement with starting distance of 10000 meters.

Player aircraft Me 262, bot target Spitfire Mk. VB.

IL-2 BoX version 5.003.

Recorded with nvidia ShadowPlay, bitrate = 50Mbps, framerate = 60fps.

All 3 video feed frame-wise sycronised and slowed down by 0.5x (making them effectively 30fps) before being exported at 60fps.

Edited December 19, 2022 by [4H]VikingSail
corrected link

[=Karaya69=VikingSail]

To better illustrate the point and to make the investigation in allign with comparative study principles, I made an updated video featuring four kinds of settings:

1080p MSAA x4

1440p DL DSA MSAA x4

1440p DL DSA MSAA x2

1440p DL DSA MSAA x0

 

Again, watch the video at 1440p.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MB7mbj7zoXWJyDNTf9oLDrDr96j3d6sr/view?usp=sharing

 

Edited December 19, 2022 by [4H]VikingSail
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