Post

Thread: I want to go over these two shots again, indulge me in a bit of pixel peeping. I think this is an illustrative example because it sets the question of faces aside; from a purely technical lighting fidelity standpoint, DLSS 5 makes this scene worse.

The most obvious issue is with the shadow cast by the tree (and also the turret in the mage's guild building there). It's almost gone; if you zoom in you can see the edge of the penumbra still there, but it's kind of of just become a noisy boundary.

In fact, the area shaded by the tree is now brighter than the area in direct sunlight in the foreground. This is a general pattern with this postprocessing effect – cast shadows are gone and replaced with general, undirected ambient light with what looks like a very heavy ambient occlusion pass.

You can see this in the really exaggerated shadows under the eaves of the building here, for example; the idea seems to be that more AO equals more better, but the geometry on those eaves is clearly that they're quite shallow and shouldn't cast a shadow like this on a sunny day.

These shadows almost seem like they're being painted over the original image, which of course they are. Here the ambient shadow in this corner just kind of... peters out halfway through.

The windows pose a particular problem because the way they're originally rendered is inaccurate in a conventional way; there's no building interiors being rendered so they're just plain specular surfaces; I think they're also slightly emissive (presumably it's more visible at night).