Version 1.2.8 - Introducing TAA and DLSS Support

Hi everyone,

I'm very happy to announce that with today's update, we are introducing Temporal Anti-Aliasing and NVIDIA DLSS support for Trails through Daybreak II. If you are interested in more detailed technical information about this, then stick around for the final part of this post, but first, let's go over the patch notes and some (potential) FAQs.

Here's the full list of changes and improvements:

• Introduce a TAA anti-aliasing option.

• Introduce DLSS3 and DLSS4 graphics options for compatible hardware.

• Always render 3D UI at 100% scale, even if the render scale is below 100%.

• Always render expanded minimap UI at 100% scale, even if the render scale is below 100%.

• Always render the time chart illustration UI at least at 100% scale, even if the render scale is below 100%.

• Load the default graphics preset on game start if no settings file is present, and adjust the preset logic to use DLSS on compatible systems.

• Fix the behaviour of the "Camera Auto Center" and "Slope Adjust" options.

• Fix the potential temporary loss of background blur in the settings menu upon changing some graphics settings.

• Prevent mouse scrolling on the Cube Analysis result screen from wrapping around the list in a surprising way.

• Prevent specific soft-locks which could occur when having a direct shortcut action binding which conflicts with another action.

• Fix an issue with loading the latest save on startup when all 225 save slots are used.

Rendering the various types of UI at least at 100% scale also applies to simple (non-DLSS) scaling, but is particularly useful in conjunction with DLSS as this makes lower render scales more viable.

TAA/DLSS Integration FAQ

Why is the performance impact of enabling TAA/DLSS slightly higher than in some other games?

Most current rendering engines always generate motion vectors, e.g. to use them for effects like object motion blur. This is not the case for Trails through Daybreak II, which means that motion vectors are only rendered when TAA or DLSS are enabled, with a slight performance cost. Of course, DLSS still allows for much more significant rendering performance savings by using a sub-100 render scale at very good output quality, and TAA provides much better performance than the more expensive AA options like MSAA or SGSSAA.

What is the difference between the "DLSS 3" and "DLSS 4" settings?

The former setting uses the traditional CNN AI model, while the latter uses the new transformer-based model for spatial upscaling. This provides improved image quality in most situations, at slightly higher performance cost.

Where are the DLSS quality settings?

To adjust the DLSS quality, just adjust the existing render scale setting. For example, "50" render scale is "Performance DLSS", and 100 render scale is "DLAA". You can actually go above 100 in our implementation, which is a bit silly and which I don't think NVIDIA has a name for. For example, the settings in the screenshot above would be using the DLSS transformer model with a scale close to the usual DLSS "Quality" preset.

Why only DLSS? What about FSR or XeSS?

Given that the majority of the work for integrating DLSS into this game went into creating reliable motion vectors for all scenes, we'd absolutely love to support all technologies that can make use of this. Sadly, neither AMD FSR nor Intel XeSS support the DirectX 11 API used by Trails through Daybreak II, while DLSS does. If a future release of either of the other temporal upscaling solutions adds DX11 support, we would certainly aim to integrate them as