A week ago it was announced that The Elder Scrolls Online would be the first game to show off Nvidia’s deep learning anti-aliasing. The tech is based on the same idea as Nvidia’s DLSS (coming to The Elder Scrolls Online at the same time), only instead of improving performance, DLAA uses AI upscaling to improve image quality—reducing jagged edges while running at your native resolution, where DLSS runs games at a lower resolution and uses upscaling to make it less noticeable.
DLAA and DLSS are live on ESO’s public test server, and MxBenchmarkPC’s has some footage comparing both to the regular temporal anti-aliasing. The video above was captured on a GeForce RTX 3080 at maximum settings, with motion blur and depth of field turned off.
If you’re squinting at that footage and having difficulty telling the difference between TAA and DLAA, you’re not alone. Shadows seem slightly better with DLAA at the cost of some fuzziness, maybe? The difference becomes much more noticeable when walking toward stairs. Start the video here and you’ll see the moiré shimmer with TAA is absent with DLAA. Whether that’s worth your framerate dropping 8% is a question only you can answer.
DLAA doesn’t seem to do much for ESO’s ghosting, and it’ll be more interesting to see what it looks like on games that aren’t an MMO from 2014 once support for it spreads.