The Elder Scrolls Online receives DLAA – DLSS without scaling

Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology is a combined anti-aliasing and scaling technology that was launched in conjunction with the first generation Geforce RTX graphics card. The technology uses the Tensor cores in the Geforce RTX 2000 and Geforce RTX 3000 series and saves performance by rendering fewer pixels, which is compensated by edge smoothing driven by artificial intelligence (AI) to maintain image quality.

It is especially at higher resolutions or heavier games that DLSS makes the most use. During a live broadcast with the next expansion for The Elder Scrolls Online in focus, a modified version with only anti-aliasing is therefore presented – Nvidia Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing (DLAA).

The technology itself is not new, but a stripped-down version of DLSS. In DLAA, the upscaling function is removed, which means that there is no performance boost when the image is rendered in the original resolution. Instead, only the edge smoothing is used, which is slightly more heavy-duty but gives a better picture. Players in The Elder Scrolls Online can thus choose to replace existing anti-aliasing techniques, including Temporal Anti-aliasing (TAA) with DLAA instead.

You won’t get a performance boost out of this, but what you will get is absolutely incredible anti-aliasing. – Rich Lambert, Creative Director på Zenimax Online Studios

The idea for the DLAA comes from the developers behind The Elder Scrolls Online, a game that with a number of years on its neck is easy enough to have no real benefit from the upscaling in DLSS. The developers realized that the aging graphics, on the other hand, could get a much-needed boost from the AI-driven anti-aliasing technology.

Based on Twitter posts from Alex Tardif at Zenimax Online Studios, it was initially an experiment where they independently tinkered with the existing DLSS solution to deactivate the scaling. This should then have resulted in a collaboration with Nvidia, which contributed to completing the project.

Currently, it is only underway for The Elder Scrolls Online, where it will debut with DLSS when the next update is launched. As with DLSS, a graphics card from either the Geforce RTX 2000 series or the Geforce RTX 3000 series is required. It is not clear whether Nvidia plans to further develop the DLAA for implementation in other games.

What do you think about DLAA versus other AA technologies? Do you want to see the technology in other games?