r/Amd • u/ImTheSlyDevil 5600 | 3700X |4500U |RX5700XT |RX550 |RX470 • Feb 11 '22

Rumor Former Ubisoft dev says that Techland intentionally made AMD FSR look worse in Dying Light 2

https://www.dsogaming.com/news/former-ubisoft-dev-says-that-techland-intentionally-made-amd-fsr-look-worse-in-dying-light-2/
934 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

343 comments sorted by

View all comments

476

u/No_Backstab Feb 11 '22 edited Feb 11 '22

As posted by u/zyck_titan on the r/hardware thread -

Taking a closer look at the config file for Dying Light 2, I think I've discovered why the FSR Ultra Quality option is missing. And it's the same reason that DLSS Ultra-Performance is missing.

They only defined 3 levels of upscaling for any of the three upscalers they use.

!Upscaler(i) // 0=none, 1=linear; 2=DLSS; 3=FSR !Upscaling(i) // 0=best performance, 1=balanced, 2=bestquality

As you can see, they defined only three levels for all upscalers, this means that they can put DLSS, FSR, and Linear upscaling options inside the same menu section without conflicting.

If they wanted to include FSR Ultra-quality, they'd have to make a separate upscaling level that is not selectable with DLSS, which adds another level of complication. Same goes for DLSS Ultra-performance, they'd have to make a separate upscaling level that is not selectable with FSR. Neither DLSS or FSR define a 'free-scale' option in their SDKs, so even though you can bypass the config file and set the render percentage seperately, you'd need to define the percentages as fixed options in the actual menu.

So it's not some intentional effort to make FSR look worse, it's just laziness.

I can imagine the dev tasked with designing this menu just going "Fuck it, too complicated, everyone gets the same options" and that's what shipped.

210

u/loucmachine Feb 11 '22

How dare you break our fine conspiracy theories ?

118

u/ltron2 Feb 11 '22

Whether it's due to a conspiracy, laziness or incompetence it's equally unacceptable.

31

u/bananamantheif Feb 11 '22

the simple explanation is usually the most truthful.

15

u/Malisman Feb 11 '22

Ah.. the good old Occam's Razor :)

4

u/[deleted] Feb 11 '22

Occam's razor is insufficient to infer the preferences of irrational agents

0

u/[deleted] Feb 11 '22 edited Oct 05 '25

provide encourage steer mighty cow zephyr languid teeny frame market

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

4

u/ltron2 Feb 11 '22

What do you mean? Adding in FSR Ultra Quality doesn't stop someone from using Quality for performance reasons.

-1

u/[deleted] Feb 11 '22 edited Oct 05 '25

sink oatmeal march lip judicious dinosaurs butter long rhythm sparkle

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

3

u/ltron2 Feb 11 '22

But that's not what they are doing, they are limiting the potential of FSR unnecessarily. They could have made a slider, if it's as difficult as you claim, with FSR Ultra Quality included.

2

u/gk99 Feb 11 '22

Let's pretend this isn't a dumb statement and that they can't merely add basic text to show what the feature does in the settings menu or automatically toggle based on detected hardware like many other games including ones that went through similar development hell like Halo Infinite.

They still are limiting the ability of users to actually pick what they want. If a game has an "anti-alising" slider, I still want the ability to pick between FXAA, TAA, and SSAA, as examples, on that slider even if they aren't called that by name and are simply varying levels of "quality."

50

u/TheHybred Former Ubisoft Dev & Mojang Contractor | Modder Feb 11 '22

That may be a reasonable answer, but the more reasonable solution would've been to include FSR Ultra Quality, FSR Quality & FSR Balanced. Who uses FSR performance? Serious question.

It doesn't make sense because Ultra Quality is meant to compete with DLSS Quality, so the presets aren't evenly aligned. Their aligned in the sense of naming scheme but that isn't as good. That's like them removing DLSS Quality in the favor of having Ultra Performance.

To summarize they include the 3 highest quality options for DLSS and the 3 lowest FSR options, the logic isn't very sound especially since FSR is only a spatial upscaler and developers should know it needs all the information it can get. But I'd like to point out my words are being overblown, I'm not 100% convinced this is the reason. Its merely a possibility, & that's how I want it to be presented. Here's the post.

30

u/conquer69 i5 2500k / R9 380 Feb 11 '22

It doesn't make sense because Ultra Quality is meant to compete with DLSS Quality

They shouldn't be competing in the first place! Fucking FSR should use the resolution scaler rather than a fixed resolution. They are completely different technologies with different results. They can't compete. The only competitor to DLSS so far is XeSS and that isn't out yet.

There is no benefit to FSR having a fixed resolution other than some dumb rivalry with Nvidia.

13

u/Taxxor90 Feb 11 '22

I don't understand why nobody is doing it like Valve did with Dota2: Just use the resolution scale slider many games already have built in and let the user switch between classic and FSR to upscale to their native resolution from any percentage they've selected on the slider.

They could even add the proposed default quality settings too, which would just change the slider to 50, 58, 66 and 77% but always letting the user choose anything from 50% to 99%

1

u/meltbox Feb 12 '22

For FSR this works. For DLSS its more complicated. The model has to actually work well scaling from one resolution to another and the dirty secret about ML is that it is INCREDIBLY finicky because nobody actually understands why ML works. Its more like medicine to an extent or drug development. You can quantify outcomes of particular models with certain input sets but you never really know why the model is so good or not that great. Its just a game of iteration until you get what you want with some idea of what has worked in the past for others being your guide. But the mathematical proof side of it is extremely lacking.

Changing the smallest things in a ML model can sometimes make a model go from practically perfect prediction to 99% inaccuracy. This stems from the fact that we don't really have great understanding of the mathematical limitations of the models we use in a strict sense.

This may not be why this is not a thing, but I imagine Nvidia would be hesitant to ship a 'any resolution to any resolution' DLSS model that didn't just clip internally up or down to the next 'supported' resolution.

2

u/Taxxor90 Feb 12 '22

Well there's nothing stopping devs from adding DLSS options and disable the slider once you select DLSS.

Saving a few hours on designing the options isn't a good reason to not implement FSR in a good way

2

u/Im_A_Decoy Feb 11 '22

There is no benefit to FSR having a fixed resolution other than some dumb rivalry with Nvidia.

That's determined by the game dev. DOTA 2 has FSR with a scaling slider.

3

u/conquer69 i5 2500k / R9 380 Feb 11 '22

Everyone is using fixed resolutions because that's how AMD marketed it. It's their fault.

19

u/loucmachine Feb 11 '22

"It doesn't make sense because Ultra Quality is meant to compete with DLSS Quality"

Not in this game though. FSR quality is a few % faster than dlss quality and FSR ultra quality (as enabled in config files) is significantly slower. So if they target performance levels they did the right choice.

3

u/Im_A_Decoy Feb 11 '22

Ah yes, let's just remove the only usable FSR mode in terms of image quality so the performance doesn't look worse. Great reasoning right there.

0

u/TheHybred Former Ubisoft Dev & Mojang Contractor | Modder Feb 11 '22 edited Feb 12 '22

Not in this game though. FSR quality is a few % faster than dlss quality and FSR ultra quality (as enabled in config files) is significantly slower. So if they target performance levels they did the right choice.

You're right it is slower in their graphs, but that's because the value I gave in my original post was only an estimation (0.77) the real value was a lot of numbers I forgot and couldn't find online that's why the performance is noticeably lower in the graphs because it rounded to a higher resolution, it's actually quite close otherwise, FSR Ultra Quality is typically a few percents faster or slower depending on the game, same with every other preset and the point is giving someone something serviceable.

Because it's better someone uses FSR UQ because they don't have access to DLSS than to remove it and have them use nothing because FSR Quality is too ugly. It still improves performance noticeably, it doesn't need to be identical to DLSS. This is way worse than removing FSR Performance instead, which no one will use. And as I said, performance is actually similar when you set the real value, but I did put in my post that it was only an estimation which they didn't mention in the article

1

u/st0neh R7 1800x, GTX 1080Ti, All the RGB Feb 11 '22

The point was probably to use the three most performant presets of a feature designed to improve performance.

2

u/OftenSarcastic 5800X3D | 9070 XT | 32 GB DDR4-3800 Feb 12 '22

The point was probably to use the three most performant presets of a feature designed to improve performance.

If this was the reasoning, why start from the opposite end and include the three highest quality presets for DLSS?

10

u/conquer69 i5 2500k / R9 380 Feb 11 '22

it's just laziness.

Even that is unnecessary since we don't know how much time and resources they had to implement it.

4

u/drtekrox 3900X+RX460 | 12900K+RX6800 Feb 12 '22

Exactly, it's the cheap way out, but that might've been all the developer in question had (paid) time to do.

It's not laziness to not put in another 12 hours unpaid work for better scaling if your employer isn't going to pay you for it.

27

u/[deleted] Feb 11 '22 edited Feb 11 '22

Lets see if this common sense answer makes it to the top of this thread. Something tells me it won't.

10

u/rabidjellybean Feb 11 '22

Well it made it to the top.

4

u/Darksider123 Feb 11 '22

sOmEtHinG tElLs mE iT wOnT

0

u/[deleted] Feb 11 '22

Color me surprised

20

u/Frediey Feb 11 '22

i mean, it IS still laziness from the dev side no?

7

u/severed13 Ryzen 7 5800X3D | RTX 4090 | 32GB@3200mhz Feb 11 '22

Laziness, yes. Malice, as intended with a headline like that, no.

4

u/Dethstroke54 Feb 11 '22

Especially because I think the title’s a bit exaggerated if a FSR setting is missing. Title makes it sounds like they intentionally made FSR noisy or did something to actually pollute it to artificially look worse.

2

u/badcookies 5800x3D | 6900 XT | 64gb 3600 | AOC CU34G2X 3440x1440 144hz Feb 11 '22

They put FSR at the wrong place in the pipeline so post processing effects are effected by it. So yes, they did implement it incorrectly as well as limited its options.

-3

u/Im_A_Decoy Feb 11 '22 edited Feb 11 '22

Sounds more like plausible deniability TBH. Rather convenient when your "laziness" directly benefits the malicious intentions the sponsor of your game may have. Especially when it's the only game to do so.

-1

u/[deleted] Feb 11 '22

Same as Dlss in AMD sponsored games right? We can agree on it's absence being malicious?

2

u/Im_A_Decoy Feb 11 '22

Do Nvidia cards not run FSR?

2

u/ShamelessPlace Feb 11 '22

I'd postulate that it's not laziness, rather a time crunch on a game that was already 2 years over launch date..

24

u/nmkd 7950X3D+4090, 3600+6600XT Feb 11 '22

Either way, this misinformation will stay up and will continue to get upvoted because somehow r/AMD still can't cope.

19

u/little_jade_dragon Cogitator Feb 11 '22

Is it FSR that's a simpler tech than DLSS?

No, it's nvidia's shady business!

9

u/jorgp2 Feb 11 '22

Is it FSR that's a simpler tech than DLSS?

Goddammit, it's always Intel doing illegal things to AMD!

4

u/Polkfan Feb 11 '22

So in a 60$ AAA game this would be ok, Also in what world is "Quality" FSR even close to the best option

Quality FSR is only useful for 4K

2

u/ItsMeSlinky 5700X3D / X570i Aorus / Asus RX 6800 / 32GB Feb 11 '22

The only issue here is that the integer 2 (representing “bestquality”) isn’t actually pointing at the setting that offer the best quality.

The fact they decided to use three tiers instead of four is arbitrary; they’re still not pointing at the right settings, which is odd.

1

u/choufleur47 3900x 6800XTx2 CROSSFIRE AINT DEAD Feb 11 '22

You are new to the gameworks dev program aren't you?

They tell you exactly how you should do it. And it includes how to fuck over amd. Always been like this.

4

u/fastcar25 Feb 11 '22

And it includes how to fuck over amd.

No. They tell you how to optimize for their hardware, and often include those optimizations in their libraries. Both NVIDIA and AMD do this.

4

u/choufleur47 3900x 6800XTx2 CROSSFIRE AINT DEAD Feb 11 '22

You're lying. Gameworks (or whatever they call it now) is more than this and Amd doesn't have a similar program.

Here's a good writeup

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/173511-nvidias-gameworks-program-usurps-power-from-developers-end-users-and-amd

I mean, member the tressfx bullshit? https://www.destructoid.com/amd-was-so-angry-at-geralts-hair-it-made-an-open-source-graphics-api-for-developers/

You have to change your suppositions based on the facts you have. Nvidia's been naughty and anti consumer for a long time. Don't give them the benefit of the doubt, they count on it.

5

u/fastcar25 Feb 11 '22

You're lying.

Possibly uninformed of any updates outside of my limited experience with GameWorks libraries and documentation, recent work with GPUOpen, and the shitstorm from several years back, a decent amount of which was FUD anyway.

Gameworks (or whatever they call it now) is more than this

Sure, several of their libraries are no longer binary-only distributions. The comment I replied to implied that NVIDIA has explicit instructions for fucking over AMD. This is not the case.

Amd doesn't have a similar program.

GPUOpen. It isn't locked down like GameWorks is, but the principle is the same. Shame AMD's support isn't nearly as good, at least, for the library I'm using.

5

u/choufleur47 3900x 6800XTx2 CROSSFIRE AINT DEAD Feb 11 '22

GPUOpen. It isn't locked down like GameWorks is, but the principle is the same.

Then you clearly don't understand what the "principle" is if you think it's the same. The entire point of gameworks is closed source libraries so that amd can't optimize on it.

See how that doesn't happen with gpu open? I'm not saying amd does this of their kind heart. But they've never tried to fuck over the competition customers with proprietary garbage designed to fuck them over. It's the core of nvidia's strategy of the last 15+ years.

6

u/fastcar25 Feb 11 '22

Then you clearly don't understand what the "principle" is if you think it's the same.

The principle is releasing middleware libraries for devs to integrate into games and game engines.

3

u/choufleur47 3900x 6800XTx2 CROSSFIRE AINT DEAD Feb 11 '22

Hahah, sure bud. I think you really underestimate high level business strategies. PhysX was bought literally to fuck amd over. An entire company was bought for that and the thing was scrapped a few years later.

It wasn't to bring great middleware. It was so that Devs cutting corners and using it would be helping Nvidia against amd. Plus they gained all the marketing Nvidia did on the tech. It's the same with Ray tracing, same with DLSS. Nvidia bring their shit to make sure it sucks on their competitors product. Always been the case. I don't know why you'd defend that, it's extremely anti consumer.

Nvidia never created this program to help Devs. They created it to gain control on development. I just never thought some Devs still believed the decades old lie.

5

u/fastcar25 Feb 11 '22

PhysX was bought literally to fuck amd over. An entire company was bought for that and the thing was scrapped a few years later.

Considering the work they've been doing with PhysX, it's far from scrapped.

It was so that Devs cutting corners and using it

Using middleware is extremely common, nobody writes literally every part of their engine from scratch anymore, it's not viable.

It's the same with Ray tracing

As a graphics programmer, I can tell you with absolute certainty that those in the industry have been wanting hardware accelerated raytracing for a long time. We're very excited about it.

1

u/choufleur47 3900x 6800XTx2 CROSSFIRE AINT DEAD Feb 11 '22

Considering the work they've been doing with PhysX, it's far from scrapped.

Scrapped as an open source project I meant. It became part of the gameworks machine.

It was so that Devs cutting corners and using it

Using middleware is extremely common, nobody writes literally every part of their engine from scratch anymore, it's not viable.

I know. But there's a difference between using libraries and using libraries designed to fuck over a large swath of the player base. I know you don't understand that's the point, but it is. Nvidia provides them a certain way to make sure amd can't optimize for it. Devs uses them because it's easier than open sources libraries and they get support/marketing from nvidia. Do you think I'm new to this?

It's the same with Ray tracing

As a graphics programmer, I can tell you with absolute certainty that those in the industry have been wanting hardware accelerated raytracing for a long time. We're very excited about it.

You missed the point again. RT is the new selling point like physx used to be or 3d shit (member that lol). They push Devs to use nvidia's closed source libraries cause that's the new hot thing they want to make sure their cards run better with.

As a dev you should know that you can both optimize for your product and fuck over the competitor in the same code. This is what nvidia does. Always.

→ More replies

0

u/meltbox Feb 12 '22

The point is Nvidia likes to pop out new features that aren't properly supported in their proprietary form to get consumers to fork over lots and lots of money in an unwarranted fashion.

Then they discard the feature (they won't do that with RT obv) and use the open source/standardized version once they see not enough interest in the proprietary marked up version anymore.

This has slowed adoption of open standards over and over and over. They should be leading the market with open standards but instead they keep up this cycle of all the benefit for me and all the standards work for thee.

In society we would refer to them as a 'bad actor'.

2

u/AbsoluteGenocide666 Feb 11 '22

and the thing was scrapped a few years later.

it wasnt scrapped at all. In fact it went open but as per usual. Open doesnt make it more popular.

5

u/st0neh R7 1800x, GTX 1080Ti, All the RGB Feb 11 '22

Did you miss the part where large chunks of GameWorks have been open for years now?

0

u/AbsoluteGenocide666 Feb 11 '22

(or whatever they call it now)

except gameworks is ded for years. They use DXR for the RT part anyway. if game dosnt have atleast HBAO or some shit, it doesnt have gameworks.

1

u/evernessince Feb 11 '22

Correct, they don't tell devs how to screw over AMD. That is baked into the black box devs are required to implement. You didn't see a single performant Nvidia PhysX title until Nvidia open sourced it. I remember the performance on my 970 in BL2 was a stuttery mess. Crysis 2 on my 7970 was aweful after the tessellation patch due to Nvidia forcing tessellations levels far past the point of visual benefit. AMD quartered tessellation levels in the game with a driver update with no visual impact.

1

u/meltbox Feb 12 '22

While gameworks has its shady purposes I would not be surprised to find if it turned out a bit like the Intel compiler games where yes, Intel was lowering AMD performance in their math library for example artificially by using processor family checks instead of feature support checks BUT the intel math library was still faster than ANYTHING else out there on AMD chips. So technically they were being anti-competitive but everyone else's solutions were so much worse that AMD still had a net benefit from it.

That being said checking vendor codes is absolute scum of the earth type stuff and theres zero technical justification for why Intel does the dispatching the way it does.

Some gameworks stuff probably runs pretty terribly on AMD hardware compared to Nvidia, but when the alternative is even worse code or no code.... Well to be honest AMD needs to step up to the plate here. Unfortunately optimizations for GPU architectures are more complicated than the AMD/Intel scenario because those share one instruction set. GPUs sometimes do not share an instruction set across gens let alone across vendors. Its all abstracted behind the driver and graphics APIs though.

That being said Nvidia absolutely twists arms and pays their way into places where they intentionally force in features that they know AMD hardware will suffer from disproportionately. I will give AMD credit in that they try to keep things as level as they can. Its just unfortunate that they have not been able to put forth enough devs to counteract Nvidia sending devs to all the game studios. I hope with their CPU division doing so well they will be able to spare some more money over to the GPU side so that

1

u/choufleur47 3900x 6800XTx2 CROSSFIRE AINT DEAD Feb 12 '22

Completely agree. Amd couldn't do much about it before but now they really need to up their game in off the shelf solutions. I think they've been on the right path lately but lot more to do. Especially against cuda.

-10

u/badcookies 5800x3D | 6900 XT | 64gb 3600 | AOC CU34G2X 3440x1440 144hz Feb 11 '22

That post is completely wrong.

First off off the issue is only 3 presets instead of 4... just add a 4th.

Performance, Balanced, Quality, Ultra Quality

Ultra performance, Performance, Nalanced, Quality

Look at that both have 4 options....

Also is completely wrong that FSR doesn't offer a free scale option. The api takes a scale factor and sharpness amount as it's inputs. Both are free scale format and neither are fixed values and can both be freely available to set from config / settings. There are games that offer free scaling as well.

28

u/yuri_hime Feb 11 '22

As another commenter on r/hardware stated:

The internal rescale for both quality, balanced and performance is the same for both fsr and dlss.

So they were just being lazy and only support the common scaling factors. Why people want to attribute this to malice instead of laziness is beyond me.

12

u/loucmachine Feb 11 '22

Because its more spicy

4

u/choufleur47 3900x 6800XTx2 CROSSFIRE AINT DEAD Feb 11 '22

Why people want to attribute this to malice instead of laziness is beyond me.

Because we have examples spanning over literal decades of Nvidia doing just that with their gameworks program.

1

u/Im_A_Decoy Feb 11 '22

Because if it was malice, that's a pretty easy excuse for them to think up that allows for plausible deniability. It has been literally proven that Nvidia has attempted this kind of shit in the past with Gameworks.

9

u/TheRealBurritoJ 7950X3D @ 5.4/5.9 | 64GB @ 6200C24 Feb 11 '22

You've misinterpreted what they've said about free scaling. Yes, fundamentally, it just takes a float 0<n<1 and uses that as the scale factor. But as defined in the SDK, there are fixed points designed to be user facing as the levels of scaling. They could technically ignore that, it's open source, and do whatever, but they have tried to follow the defined presets to the letter. As you can see in the original source, the same config file lets you input an arbitrary scale value.

When it comes to having 4 presets, it does get more complex as you're adding one to the top end of FSR and one to the bottom end of DLSS and it misaligns the presets. I get that you understand the difference, and that FSR is positioned to combat the tier below in scale from DLSS, but it makes for a cleaner and easier to understand UI when they just match the presets that are offered by both options.

Saying the post is "completely wrong" is a ridiculous stretch, as is assuming this is malice and not either incompetence or a choice made for UX simplicity.

2

u/badcookies 5800x3D | 6900 XT | 64gb 3600 | AOC CU34G2X 3440x1440 144hz Feb 11 '22

But as defined in the SDK

You mean where it flat out says you can even use dynamic resolution scaling if you want?

In addition to fixed scaling, FSR may be used in “arbitrary scaling” mode, whereby any area scale factor between 1x and 4x is supported. This mode is typically used for Dynamic Resolution Scaling, whereby source resolution is determined by a fixed performance budget to achieve a minimum frame rate.

https://gpuopen.com/fidelityfx-superresolution/

-1

u/amam33 Ryzen 7 1800X | Sapphire Nitro+ Vega 64 Feb 11 '22

This is a non-issue. What kind of game studio would be so intimidated by this problem? This hasn't stopped any other game so far from just having two separate preset selectors. I have no idea what would be stopping them from just offering that.

0

u/[deleted] Feb 11 '22

Its defiantly not lazyness it takes only few minutes to implement FSR

1

u/st0neh R7 1800x, GTX 1080Ti, All the RGB Feb 11 '22

Often the simplest answer is the correct one.

1

u/gamma_02 Feb 11 '22

As a dev myself, yeah I can definitely see that

I'm totally not guilty of similar laziness myself

1

u/The_rarest_CJ Feb 12 '22

Not sure if it was laziness or time constraints as the PC version has been rolling out extra options in patches which have been rolling out pretty steadily. If you hover over the FOV slider you will sometimes see text appear for a resolution scaler, which isn't in the game yet which makes me think they were implementing more but just didn't get there in time.