What CS:GO is meant to look like
don't worry this isn't yet another video about upscaling i know you're probably sick of it all by now so this video will be about the exact opposite of that which does come with its own pros and cons and even if you don't want to use it in cs go it's still worth knowing about oh okay as it could help in other games and situations but before i explain it i do need to tell you about up scaling again first it's the idea of getting a low resolution image and making it look kind of like a higher resolution one i covered how to do this in videos just the other week so far your opinions have been divided with one half arguing what's the point why not play the game at low resolutions instead while the other half of you are arguing what's the point why not play the game at higher resolutions instead indeed in this video i'll be doing exactly that by doing the opposite of upscaling guess what it's called i'll give you a second you're gonna love this it's down sampling i want downscaling works as well both work so upscaling gets a smaller image and stretches it in the hope of keeping frame rates high and the image quality as not bad as possible but downscaling gets an image larger than your monitor and crushes it down to fit it brute forcing a better quality result there's no fancy tech here just pure brute force pixel pushing why what is the purpose in that isn't that just really wasteful yes incredibly but also not because it produces the most incredible image quality possible a real treat for the eyes and it might not even come with any noticeable downside but first this video sponsor nordvpn established 10 years ago and going from strength to strength since norvpn now has over 5000 servers in 60 countries across the world to commemorate this achievement nordvpn are offering the same reliable services always but if you use the code clicks then you'll get an extra bonus off the already heavily discounted two-year plan and with that you'll get a robust vpn service that will help you tunnel your internet traffic through to another location on the planet this will help keep the doors open to information access and services which right now some people are finding very handy indeed it comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee so if nordvpn doesn't earn your affections within that time frame then you can leave and carry on your way regardless but if you're looking for widespread fast vpn access then nor vpn is a long-established proven option with easy-to-use software and some powerful features like an internet kill switch should your connection to their servers go down and they've now broadened their defenses with new threat protection features which defend against malicious ads and downloads which otherwise would have their own sneaky ways of tracking you so if you're in the market for a vpn then check out the link in this video's description and remember the code clicks while you're down there click on the settings cog and choose quality notice how it doesn't stop at 1080p but can go higher still first to 1440p and then to 2160p 4k quality you might not ever have used this before if you're not on a 4k screen you might think it's useless but it isn't i urge you to click on it and to see what it does to your image quality it should make this video look significantly sharper than the lower resolutions do the first reason why is the bit rate this deliberately complicated looking scene looks rubbish at lower resolutions because it isn't given enough information on youtube to make it look right but the other reason 4k looks better is because of down scaling this image for instance is csgo running at 1080p this is the same image at 4k 1080p 4k 1080p 4k even if you're only on a 1080p screen you should still be able to see the differences notably to the edges of stuff which should appear crisper and sharper a 4k screen is needed to fully appreciate this effect but it is surprising how much of this carries down to a 1080p screen even though you'd think that anything more than 1080p on a 1080p screen would be pointless but here's the thing it isn't you know what time it is it's time to tackle that question that everyone's been asking what is a pixel seriously what is it it's a dot on the screen each one represents a single color yet they're so much more than just that a pixel can form part of a larger object like a barrel or it can even be the nether region between two different barrels a prestigious role indeed this is where downscaling really comes into its own and if you're not excited about it at this point then there's no helping you so despite these pixels all just being one color each they can still represent one or several points from within the space they sit and more is better but let's call off for a bit forget about all this downscaling and look at what 1080p is it is what your screen probably is after all this is a 1080p image on a 1080p screen each pixel will represent exactly one point from inside itself and if we look at this cable you can see that it just isn't enough it looks horrible it's like something out of minecraft and that's because each pixel either represents the cable or the wall behind it this results in the dreaded step effect these are known as jaggies or aliasing if only there was a way of unjackifying it of anti-aliasing it that's convenient msaa is great two times msaa grabs two different spots from inside a pixel so if both land on the cable then the pixel looks like a cable if both land on the wall then the pixel looks like the wall but if one lands on each it becomes half and half the result is a much smoother looking line thanks to the pixels that look halfway between the cable and the wall and then you have four and eight times msa which do the same thing but with even more increments in between how much anti-aliasing can you have there was a time when even counter-strike had more than eight times it was called 16 times csaa in the options menu it was meant to be like eight times msaa but with a bit more but i never saw any difference in practice but it still made me feel good about being able to enable it 16 times but things went higher still years ago amd graphics cards had wide and narrow tent options which went as high as 24 times i think these got samples from the surrounding areas causing a very soft blurry look i remember one particular lan party where i forced this on in every game that i played and i think there was 32 times csaa as well and then there was quincunx anterior thing that everybody hated because it made it look all out of focus like the whole thing had been shifted across by half a pixel you can tell it was a bad idea because it doesn't exist anymore and then there's super sampling which is msa across the whole screen which means it serves the same purpose as downscaling and if you see ss and think it sounds familiar for some reason that's because it makes up the second half of dlss name long story short a lot of big numbers and silly experiments were thrown around in the early days of anti-aliasing there was a phase that graphics cards went through and eventually grew out of so you're not missing out on much so what's the problem why don't we just use eight times msaa to solve this whole mess well for a start it can be quite demanding to run but the bigger problem is it misses some of the edges these palm tree leaves for instance are still pixelated even with eight times msaa because it doesn't even touch these edges it doesn't see them as that it sees them as a flat texture with some transparent holes in so it doesn't even touch them unfortunately this is why we don't see msa too much in games anymore there are just too many things it fails to touch so what can we use instead we could use upscale no i promise i wouldn't talk about that so what we need instead is a hero an anti-aliasing hero oh look it's fxaa here to save the day put it simply fxaa intrudes onto your screen bomb its vaseline all over the place your mum and then tumbles out the nearest window to ruin somebody else's day nice one fxaa you did your best just happens to be really really bad actually no ignorance is bliss fxaa will smooth the image effectively and very quickly so at a pinch it's a great solution for fans of super high frame rates to use but i can ruin it for you by showing you that it's literally the same as no anti-aliasing at all but much blurrier it doesn't add more details it can't for example construct small details like the prongs on these antenna like msaa can because msaa is adding detail to the image while fxaa is merely shooting google over what's already there we need another kind of hero a down-sampling hero do you remember those early half-life alex pictures they look great didn't they this is in part because it's source too but i think there's more to it than that if you zoom into these early pictures you won't find a single stray pixel in sight it's so good in fact i don't think it's the work of anti-aliasing i think that downscaling must be involved here i believe that these images must have been crushed down from some staggeringly high resolution 8k maybe possibly even 16k because every detail looks so well defined it's less like a video game image and more like a photo so here you go on the left csgo without anti-aliasing in the middle eight times msaa which is the current best but on the right is an image that was rendered at 8k then crushed down to 1080p and the result is glorious this is what the game is meant to look like all this time you've assumed that those palm trees are meant to look like something from a playstation 2 game but if they're shown properly they actually look like palm trees just as nature intended and it's almost as though this weird globe thing was made simply to show off how great down sampling is and how inferior the rendering methods are that we've grown accustomed to using instead and this crate on the ground previously untouched by anti-aliasing now reveals the crisscross pattern it was always meant to have as nature intended even on edges the msa has already smoothed down sampling improves them further still the edge of this tree trunk even smoother it is absolutely glorious just a shame that downsampling slows your pc down isn't it but what if it didn't what if you could run it as quickly as any other setting then there would be no downside and looking at what the pros are using i can say that most of them can down sample with barely any impact to their frame rate at all how could this be how can you get so much more for free it's simple in your pc you have a cpu and a gpu and these are the components which dictate your frame rate at a certain graphical resolution there's a sweet spot well they'll both be working as quickly as each other i've added some numbers onto this graph to demonstrate how this works this line represents your cpu or processor you can see this one can power cs go at 500 fps it doesn't care which resolution you're playing the game at it can still power cs go at 500 fps but this line represents the gpu or graphics card and you can see this one really cares about which resolution you're gaming at this one can play csgo at 720p at 1000 fps but it can only run 4k at 100 fps if you put these two components together though and it'll show how quickly your pc can run csgo at 720p even though your graphics card could run at 1000 fps you won't be getting that no you'll only be getting 500 fps because it's being limited by your cpu which can only handle 500 fps you're being cpu limited look to the other extreme and the opposite is happening your cpu can still give you 500 fps but you won't get it because your graphics card is now the one limiting you down to just 100 fps you're being gpu limited and somewhere between these two is a sweet spot where both your cpu and gpu are being maxed out it's at this theoretical point that you'll still be getting the maximum frame rate possible but it'll still look much nicer than playing down here in this computer the sweet spot is at 1080p there's literally no point in gaming at anything lower than that because it won't improve your performance of course you might still argue that you'd still rather play a 720p just in case sure okay but i'm the opposite and i urge you to consider this as well ask yourself which frame rate are you happy with 60 144 300 because unless you need 500 which let's face it you probably don't then with this computer you could comfortably go beyond the sweet spot until you drop down to the lowest frame rate that you're happy with now some of you will scoff at this if you're on a super slow potato pc then you don't have this luxury you might not be happy with any of the frame rates that you get at any resolution and if you want to reach your desired frame rate you may have no other choice but to upgrade your pc i am saying this to acknowledge that you exist but that this video's topic isn't aimed at you this is instead aimed at people with powerful graphics cards who may be gaming down here when they really don't need to be i'll also point out that upgrading your cpu counter-intuitively means that you benefit more from playing at a low resolution which is great if you really need 700 fps instead of 500 but again for the rest of us at some point surely we've got to start benefiting from a higher resolution than from more frame rates so what does this mean for you i'd recommend that you find a demanding spot on a demanding map and that you test it out at different resolutions using your computer you might be pleasantly surprised to discover that you can game at acceptable frame rates at a massive resolution like 1080p or maybe even higher still entering the world of down sampling where you force a resolution that's higher than your monitor has the pixels to fully display to enable these magical higher resolutions nvidia owners will want to enable dsr in their control panel and amd owners are looking for something called the sr which is the same but for amd as an example of the sort of testing you could start out with i used this spot on ancient experimenting with all sorts of different resolutions and levels of anti-aliasing and these were the frame rates i got and what a show-off i am anything in green is so similar to what i get at 720p that is virtually the same you can see that 1440p with msaa runs at 93 the speed that 720p does which in my opinion and most other gamers that makes it worth using 1440p instead look at that had i not done this testing i might have thought this level of graphical fidelity would have come with a greater performance impact than it really does the values in yellow do run a bit slower than 720p but still very well and the red ones perform at below 75 percent the maximum speed my pc could output you can see that running cs go at 4k with eight times msaa and fxaa runs at only 54 of my pc's maximum speed oh no that means i'm only getting 226 frames a second which is still perfectly fine for me how about that so yeah higher resolutions and settings look nicer if only there was a way of getting the benefits with fewer of the downsides and that's what dl dsr attempts to do it will only be available to you in nvidia's control panel and only if you have an rtx card it currently supports just a few resolutions but if you enable it then it swaps out the traditional dsr version of downscaling for a new experimental one that nvidia claims uses deep learning to improve the image quality so just to establish what dl dsr is it's still downscaling it is still running at a higher resolution than your screen is so it will still run slower than native resolution well but nvidia claims it makes this process more efficient they state that dldsr makes 2.25 times the resolution of native look as good as four times does that's almost double the number of pixels for free based on this claim i calculated all of these figures for those of you who are interested but the shortened symbol of it is if your monitor is this then dldsr will run as slowly as this resolution does but should look as good as this resolution would in other words you get extra visual quality for the cost of a lower one how is it magic i can confirm that it isn't magic i can also confirm that it runs only one to two percent slower than the resolution that it's based upon and it does look nicer than that resolution but it's harder to explain exactly what's going on here but first some comparisons between it and the traditional dslr downscaling first when they're both set to zero percent smoothness this is going to be the sharpest option and probably how competitive players will want to use this setting what you're seeing here is the more traditional older method of downscaling called dsr and what strikes me about it is how uneven the result looks in some bits of the image it's well anti-aliased but other parts of the screen are left untouched i assume this is down to how it's trying to crush one and a bit pixels into each and every one the maths involved is messy and so is the result but whatever dl dsr the new method is doing it's doing more consistently it's giving the entire image the same high standard of anti-aliasing while still somehow managing to retain the sharpness of the textures i'd say it's too sharp the walls look like crumpled paper and it looks like there's noise in the sky and tree leaves yet i wouldn't be surprised if pros opted to play the game like this for the crazy levels of sharpness it provides 33 smoothness in the control panel is the default amount that nvidia recommends and dslr being the normal kind of downscaling looks okay like this but it still fails to anti-alias a number of the edges but the benefit is that it's still sharper than you might expect from an image that's been downscaled switching over to dldsr and this is the sweet spot for me it's still very sharp but not ridiculously so anymore and the anti-aliasing is sublime especially given that none is active in csgo that's right these images are being managed with zero anti-aliasing in-game and last here's a 100 smoothness which makes dsr look like a bad nintendo 64 game that's at least two rows of anti-aliasing on the roof here how about that it's made 1440p look like 144p but the 100 smoothness setting makes the ldsr look about normal the textures don't look sharp anymore nor do they look overly soft but let's face it you'll still want to play with more sharpness than this won't you so we've established that 33 is the sweet spot so i'll show a few comparisons at this setting as i talk about it more in short first impressions of dl dsr are very positive indeed it somehow manages to be sharper and better anti-aliased than the traditional dsr option for downscaling is so i think it's fair to say that most people will look at these images and will say that dl dsr is undisputedly better and this is just the 1.78 times mode it's got a higher quality 2.25 x 1 as well but i don't need to test that for this video the strengths of the technology are already evident in this mode and if you somehow want smoother edges still and have some performance left over then just add some msa to csgo to really iron out the trickiest edges going up to 2.25 times is good for adding more stability to the really fine details of the image but it of course comes with more of a performance impact but to summarize dldsr does away with pixelation of any sort it's movie levels of smoothing i'd even say it looks a bit too smooth in parts sometimes you don't want it to be smooth sometimes an image should have some mess and noise to it which the ldsr completely eradicates and swaps out for a perfect almost painted look instead dare i say it even inherits some of the looks from dlss one ultimately it's down to personal preference whether you think dldsr is an improvement or not but one thing i can do is to compare it with how the image should look i'll start by confirming that dldsr is literally based on the same resolution as it claims to be rendering at i know this sounds obvious but right now there are people out there who believe that this technology is magic but it isn't it does start off with the same pixels as a normal image of that resolution would how do i know that it's obvious you can tell that by the way it is and how these bits here are in the same bits as the same but slightly blurrier bits in this image here trust me on this so it starts with the same image and then applies dldsr magic to it but how do we establish whether this magic also adds tangible detail to the image to aid me in this meet nice tree one when you look at this tree what do you see yes you see leaves but between them you see gaps gaps and leaves leaves and gaps now let's move the camera away from it pay attention to what happens to the gaps between the leaves at a lower resolution it loses these gaps making the tree appear more opaque and thus bigger and scarier looking than it should be but a higher resolution image retains the gaps better and is therefore more faithful to how it should look clearly this tree is supposed to look see-through so if dldsr does indeed add detail to the image you'd expect it to make the tree look more see-through so if we move from this 8k image which shows a lot of holes in the tree down to the resolution the dldsr is based upon but with dldsr disabled then it looks like this and with far fewer transparent looking bits now as i enable dldsr i'm hoping that more transparent bits will appear if it actually adds detail to the image oh dear that's not good the ldsr doesn't manage to make the bush more see-through in fact it appears to be doing the opposite making the bush even less transparent than it should be for the resolution it's based upon you know what else does this fxaa oh no now of course the ldsr looks nicer than fxaa does but it works in the same sort of way it doesn't add detail it merely gets the image and applies a filter to it admittedly dldsr's filters seem more intelligent than simply to blob the whole image up but at the end of the day i'm seeing nothing more than pretty post-process effects going on here so what is dldsr's secret to its success for a start running the game above the resolution your monitor displays must help it a lot but i also think it's how it retains as much detail as it does as it shrinks down to your monitor's display for you to see i've acknowledged that it doesn't add more detail to the image than the resolution it's using would suggest nvidia's claimed that it's the equivalent of a higher one must be down to how smooth the edges are or the sharpness of its textures which i suspect was achieved just by applying the upscaling algorithm they created but for downscaling instead but i could be wrong i must move on so while dldsr produces a lovely smooth image even without anti-aliasing if you want the most accurate image quality then you're still better off brute forcing the downscaling with high resolutions and anti-aliasing levels instead the higher you go the closer to perfection the image will become so to those of you looking to up your image quality then turning on anti-aliasing is a great place to start and it shouldn't impact your frame rate as significantly as increasing your resolution will however decent modern computers should have no problem running the game at 1080p and once you've already done that and have added two or four times anti-aliasing the game will already look great and many of you will stop there but just know the visuals will continue to improve as you push up beyond that and when it comes to the wonderful world of down scaling if you're on a 1080p screen then 1440p with two times msaa is a good place to start and then you should scale upwards or downwards from there depending on the frame rate you're getting and yes the ldsr is an option at that point if you like the image it produces but the highest feasible setting you could aim for if wanting to take super pretty screenshots or if you're filming a frag movie will be 4k with eight times msaa that remains the holy grail if you want csgo to look absolutely as close to perfection as it possibly can right now it looks like the shift has begun rodder an official posted on reddit a few months ago remarking that a number of pros had already started using anti-aliasing maybe the scene has started to appreciate better image quality and the potential of modern graphics cards and about time i say and the next step beyond this is downscaling it's a taste of the future it will make cs go look better than it should do on your screen right now and we'll make it look more like it will do once we finally jump to higher resolution monitors maybe 5 or 10 years down the line and if your graphics card can already handle it at a frame rate you're happy with why not start playing that way a little early
2022-04-02 00:27
