About ten days ago the developers of The Elder Scrolls Online have announced that the title will be the first to implement NVIDIA DLAA, initials of Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing. According to what has been declared, this is a technology derived from DLSS (a sort of spin-off) which, instead of aiming for performance improvement through upscaling, is betting on image quality, improving the definition of textures at native resolution and in particular reducing jagged edges.
The youtube channel MxBenchmarkPC experimented with DLAA, DLSS e TAA on The Elder Scrolls Online public test server, making a video in which technologies are compared at 1080p, 1440p and 4K resolutions with maximum details – motion blur and depth of field disabled – on a system with a Core i7-10700F CPU and GeForce RTX 3080 video card.
If you too are having a hard time identifying really noticeable changes in the video, don’t feel alone. A few more differences can be seen in 4K, with DLSS returning higher frame rates but with a slightly more blurry image in some respects, while DLAA and TAA reproduce sharper detail. The DLAA impacts slightly more in terms of performance compared to the TAA, about 8%, but also reduces the shimmering on objects at a distance.
For the moment we don’t seem to be facing a revolution, but a single game is little to judge and The Elder Scrolls Online is certainly not a graphically relevant game. Furthermore, it is not certain that the implementation of DLSS and DLAA cannot improve between now and the actual debut. There is one aspect, and it is clearly that of the widest possible choice for users, between those who are satisfied with DLSS and want a high frame rate and those who prefer maximum quality detail.