Upscaling Visual Comparison
We also wanted to show visuals, because numbers with latency are one thing, but side by side comparisons are always going to be a key point, because no one wants super high performance if it results in the game looking like garbage, and we will be doing some more content on this soon in a lot more titles, comparing performance and visuals.
For the visuals in Alan Wake II we see at native the game is expectedly amazing looking, and when we enable upscaling we see some loss of quality, with things being just a little more fuzzy looking, and with a little more noise, but nothing too bad and definitely nothing you’ll notice when gaming. When we enable frame generation we really don’t see anything that stands out visually, and I wasn’t able to pick up on anything out of place or any artifacts, so all in all, this is a pretty good way of playing the game.
With raytracing turned on we don’t see too much changing, but it does provide a more realistic look. This is probably because raytracing is kind of always enabled in alan wake, and the raytracing settings are more about path tracing, so that’s expected as we aren’t getting the same sort of jump in visuals as we would going from no ray tracing at all to ray tracing enabled.
When we enable upscaling we don’t really see much difference at all, and almost nothing is noticeable visually. This is mostly the case when we enable multi-frame generation too, but one very small difference is that when the light flashes on the wall, we see the graffiti’s reflection flicker a bit, so it’s really not a whole lot of obvious differences, and overall i think it’s a worthwhile sacrifice to make for much better frame rates.
Moving over to Cyberpunk, and if you haven’t seen any of our 5090 content then may want to check that out as we have already gone over the visual differences between the different settings, so for the sake of brevity, I won’t be going into as much detail here and since we’ve learned that there really isn’t any noticeable difference in quality so for this we’ll only be comparing native to frame gen.
Comparing the game regularly with multi-frame generation enabled doesn’t really give much of a visual difference, and in this scene in particular, takes almost nothing away. You could argue that there is more noise but it’s so negligible that you can’t really tell but what if we compare the models though? Well, when we put our frame generation clips together we see very few differences once again, but if you look closer than you find that the CNN model is a little bit less clear, with the most noticeable point being underneath the light where you can see the smoke has more visual noise on the older model, whereas the transformer model provides a slightly clearer visual.
Raytracing then improves our visuals, with better lighting and reflections as you would expect, but it does add some visual noise; and when we take a look at how multi-frame generation affects things we can see, again, barely any difference. One very small thing I noticed was that the reflection of the neon sign in the puddle had a very slight delay in its movement when compared to the idle camera movement and the sign on the wall. This was present without upscaling enabled but it did get a very slight exaggeration with upscaling. When we look at CNN though we find that not much changes, but if you’re paying close attention, you can see that it does introduce a more obvious noise into the visuals, albeit only slightly
Path tracing is last and yet again, visuals are improved over ray tracing, even if it does vastly change the way the scene looks. When we compare native to multi-frame gen we see some minor differences like we saw with the visual noise like before, but we also see the entire scene brighten up, and this scene takes place in a room that has no outside lighting so it remains consistent throughout, meaning that this isn’t a change in game time causing the sun to light the room up more.
This is a pretty interesting difference and I’m not really sure why it happened, as we didn’t see this kind of behaviour with the other tests so the fact that it shows up with path tracing is a bit odd. Then when we look at CNN we see that it once again only really introduces a bit of extra visual noise
