Remedy's Control vs DLSS 2.0 - AI upscaling reaches the next level

Consider this. Ten years ago, Digital Foundry was mulling over Alan Wake's 960x540 resolution (actually 544p!) and wondering if reducing pixel count this much was a compromise too far. Ten years later - almost to the day - we're playing the latest game from the same developer at the same internal resolution, and in some respects, it looks better than native 1080p. Nvidia's DLSS - deep-learning super-sampling - has evolved to a new 2.0 rendition and the results of its AI upscaling in Remedy's Control are simply astonishing.

As we've documented in the past, DLSS has had something of a chequered history, its implementation varying in effectiveness from one game to the next - but the underlying principles remain unchanged. Next generation rendering techniques - ray tracing in particular - often come with a substantial cost to performance. DLSS works on the principle of improving performance by lowering the internal pixel count, then using a mixture of temporal and AI inferencing components to reconstruct the image up to a higher resolution.

Typically, the new DLSS 2.0 offers three presets - performance, balanced and quality - which render at 50 per cent, 58 per cent and 67 per cent of native resolution on both axes on titles such as Wolfenstein: Youngblood. Control is somewhat different. It's a little more transparent in that the user simply specifies internal and output resolutions.

Read more