Comparison video shows Nvidia's new DLAA tech alongside TAA and DLSS in Elder Scrolls Online

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A week ago it was announced that The Elder Scrolls Online would be the first game to show off Nvidia's deep learning anti-aliasing. The tech is based on the same idea as Nvidia's DLSS (coming to The Elder Scrolls Online at the same time), only instead of improving performance, DLAA uses AI upscaling to improve image quality—reducing jagged edges while running at your native resolution, where DLSS runs games at a lower resolution and uses upscaling to make it less noticeable.

DLAA and DLSS are live on ESO's public test server, and MxBenchmarkPC's has some footage comparing both to the regular temporal anti-aliasing. The video above was captured on a GeForce RTX 3080 at maximum settings, with motion blur and depth of field turned off.

If you're squinting at that footage and having difficulty telling the difference between TAA and DLAA, you're not alone. Shadows seem slightly better with DLAA at the cost of some fuzziness, maybe? The difference becomes much more noticeable when walking toward stairs. Start the video here and you'll see the moiré shimmer with TAA is absent with DLAA. Whether that's worth your framerate dropping 8% is a question only you can answer.

DLAA doesn't seem to do much for ESO's ghosting, and it'll be more interesting to see what it looks like on games that aren't an MMO from 2014 once support for it spreads.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.