We disagree on few things, but i don't want to make this a long debate. So probably last reply.
yeah, its not for everyone definitely, but I play at 1440p, and atleast untill, next gen consoles hit mainstream, you'll be fine, since a PS5 on average has 12-13gigs usable for vram.
yeah, but there will be games that that will go beyond consoles. And then there are mods. I had trouble in increasing LOD in W3 at 1440p because of VRAM limits. Things like that will keep getting worse with time.
12gb is at the absolute limit and so we basically get a timer limit on the gpu irrespective of its performance.
And then if you move to 4k in future ( 4k 32 is nice / large tv etc ) or ultrawide - because why not at this price range - then more issues.
Its certainly a tradeoff these days - RT/DLSS or VRAM or spend crazy or buy used old gen.
unless you mean something else by CAS other than AMD FX CAS aka Contrast Adaptive Sharpening, then yes I have used and you clearly havent used either DLDSR or DLAA if you think CAS is better or they both have a larger perf penalty compared to CAS.
DLDSR is nothing but setting monitor res to greater than native, like 4k (preferrably integer scaling), and then using DLSS perf to get the higher res image which you set in the control panel, which then is downsampled to native res, it literally improves performance somewhat, doing it manually without DLDSR has some issues, since there's some overhead in converting the higher res frame to native res, DLDSR eliminates that bottleneck.
And assuming its a 1080p monitor, you are essentially upscaling from native res and then downsampling it again, since DLSS perf has a scaling factor of 2x, so at 4k, internal res would be 1080p. there's virtually no performance penalty aside from a few frames and frametimes increasing a little when using DLDSR, and in fact at 1440p, you'll get a minor boost in perf, since you'll be upscaling from 1080p, instead of 1440p
And DLAA further improves on this process, by abstracting all of this away internally, no need to set res, or whatever, its all done internally and the reason DLAA is not recommended is, it runs at native res, without any upscaling by design, so you dont get any perf boost, just straight up upgrade to image quality.
yeah disagree quite a bit. you had said that CAS will smear shit which makes no sense.
DLSS / CAS are different things. CAS is more like sharpening filters from Nvidia. I use both CAS and DLSS and like both.
Some background - i bought 3080 2 years back. First played it on 1080p, then upgraded to Acer 1440p and then to 4k 32.
1) I have used DLDSR a lot at 1080p and 1440p. Its great for those resolutions because games are shit these days at lower res. Also used it to play gta 5 which has shit AA.
Digital Hardware had a video about how things are made for 4k and lower res is extra blurry. So this helped and yeah i used it with DLSS to get some perf back.
At 4k, its generally not needed and anyway performance cost will be too high.
DLDSR is not free, it costs a lot and we use DLSS to get some back. But its still costly vs DLSS alone.
Also you dont need integer scaling for it, which is how it differs from older DSR ( + machine learning stuff)
2) DLAA does not improve upon DLDSR, they are different things. Ex see
here.
3) DLDSR/DLSS does not remove benefits that we can get from sharpening through CAS/NIS.
Some people like soft, so maybe they dont care. To me image quality improves substantially if things get less blurry.
tradeoff is that you can get artifacts ( esp far away things) and some flickering in areas.
CAS at default settigs via reshade does not seem to have much downside and with very little perf impact, i love it.
In Witcher 3 next gen, i played at 1440p with DLDSR + DLSS ( balanced, perf was blurry in motion) and on top of this i used CAS and it looked better vs DLDSR + DLSS alone.
Metro Exodus at 1440p looked very bad in motion which DLDSR fixed ( + used DLSS and it still fixed it). And i added CAS on top of that which made things sharper when still ( ex - blurry weapons).
As an aside -
So much nonsense we have to do these days because game developers have gone lazy.
WD 1 was nice and sharp. Its crazy to see older games being cleaner vs new ones sometimes.
Doom eternal at 4k is beautiful and sharp with default DLSS sharpening. No need for extra stuff + it has extremely good HDR.