Coop zombie shooter, Left 4 Dead 2 is all set to get a sequel after more than a decade in the form of Back 4 Blood, a fitting name considering the popularity of the franchise. The open beta for the same concluded a few days back with plenty of participation from the PC gaming community. In this post, we have a look at the DLSS implementation in the game. Back 4 Blood features the latest variant of DLSS (2.2.x), and as such is a good demonstration of how far the technology has come.
In foresight, DLSS looks lighter than native (likely a result of the auto-exposure feature) but if you ignore that, the upscaling looks rather flawless. There’s no additional aliasing with DLSS balanced despite being significantly faster. At the same time, it’s worth noting that a fair amount of shading is lost with DLSS which erodes the quality of ambient occlusion and shadows, something we’ve seen in the past, although to a lesser extend.
Vegetation and nets are usually the hardest to upscale without an apparent loss in detail, however, as you can see in the above shot, DLSS does it without any complications. As noted before though, ambient shadowing is adversely affected. (moneypip.com)
Once again, as you can observe, DLSS preserves particle effects quite well, although the higher brightness makes it look a bit off. I expect this to be fixed in the final version.
It’d be fair to say that DLSS has evolved into a near-perfect upscaling technology, fixing the downsides of traditional super-sampling anti-aliasing as well as temporal upsampling techniques both at once.
