Games

Well, if nothing else I've made my case.

I mean, I'm not gonna go build a Digital Foundry comparison video for you, but this type of argument is definitely what I'm talking about when I say I don't understand what people just claiming this out of the blue even think they're saying.

Alright, so no, TAA doesn't look worse "compared to some older AA tech". For one thing our benchmarks for "some older AA tech" is MSAA used on 720p (on a good day) on consoles. MSAA did a valiant effort that generation, but it doesn't scale well with resolution, so while the comparatively very powerful PC GPUs were able to use it effectively at 1080p60 they were already struggling. And to be clear, those games looked like mud compared to newer targets.

We are now typically aiming for 4K, which is four times as many pixels, and at semi-arbitrary refreshes, often in the hundreds on PCs. TAA does a comparable-to-better job than MSAA much faster, so cranking up the base resolution is viable. DLSS goes one further and is able to upres the image, not just smooth out edges, even if the upres data is machine-generated.

"MSAA looked better" is almost entirely rose tinted glasses.

Internal resolution with DLSS is variable. Some games have a setting to select it on the fly depending on load, but all games give you a quality selector, so it's ultimately a matter of power to performance where you want to set your base resolution and your output resolution. DLSS is heavier than most TAA but much better. If you're keeping output res and settings, then yeah, you're going to lower resolution a bit to compensate the loss, probably, but you can absolutely run DLSS at native resolution (that's normally called DLAA). It looks great, but any AA at native 4K is gonna be heavy, so you need pretty powerful hardware for that.

So the internal resolution hasn't "gone down". You may need to lower it in some games to hit performance, but that's always been the case. What has changed is we're pushing super high definition images compared to the PS3 and even the PS4 generation. 4 to 16 times bigger.

And yeah, upscaling can show artifacts around some elements, but so can old AA. Modern versions of DLSS and FSR are a lot cleaner than older ones, but it's not a downgrade against most comparables. It becomes a matter of whether you think some of the ghosting on particles or fast motion was more annoying than fizzling on detailed areas or thin lines. If a preference for one over the other was the conversation I'd be more than happy to chalk it up to taste, but that's not how this is often framed. And again, modern upscaling is improving much faster than older AA techniques, a lot of the artifacting is gone, not just for new games, but for older ones where newer versions of these systems can be selected even if they weren't implemented at launch. It's actually pretty neat.

And that wall of text is, I think, why this conversation is so obtuse and confusing these days. That's a lot of nuance, and it's still superficial. People just go "this looks like crap because of particles or whatever" and I guess that's fine, but it barely correlates to anything in reality, it's quite deeply impacted by half-remembered results that really don't hold up as well as people remember and clarifying all this is certainly not worth the effort. Just saying it online is a lot simpler and easier, though.