Nvidia DSR vs. Resolution Scale

[Bert Rochau]

Quick disclaimer - this is probably more of a post for the Geforce forums, but nobody there could answer it for me and I'm rather partial to this website.

I was quite excited when I heard Nvidia was including DSR with their new drivers. I assumed that this technology was going to work similarly to Battlefield 4's "screen resolution" option. In that game, raising the "screen resolution" above 100% significantly improves not only anti-aliasing, but also texture quality. My understanding is that this improvement is a result of full-screen anti-aliasing (FSAA) rendering a more accurate display of the game world.

Anyways, I figured DSR would have a similar effect as BF4's "screen resolution" thing as I understood it to be the same tech as "screen resolution." Curious, I tested DSR on a bunch games, including BF4, CS:GO, and Company Of Heroes. As expected, DSR improved anti-aliasing significantly when used in these games, but - as far as I could tell - it didn't have any effect on texture quality whatsoever (including when applied to Battlefield 4).

I'm really curious why that might be, because if I could get the improvements to texture quality offered by BF4's "screen resolution" applied to other games, I would be sorely tempted to upgrade my GPU.

 

[Warukyure]

I don't have a definitive answer but I believe that it could be 2 things, a) Battlefield 4 probably contains hi res textures so that when you enable Resolution Scale it uses the right assets. b) the FrostBite 3 engine might have something to do with it as well.

This could explain why when you have DSR for other games you get more AA but the textures are more or less the same.