Comparison of All Sharpening Filters

Hi, I made a huge amount of screenshots (150 to be precise) across different games and in different resolutions to compare several sharpening filters against blurry TAAed games or for crisper upscaling. You can find them here:
misie.ga/sharp (ad-free website)

Benchmarks below .

Thanks Matt, this is awesome!

I appreciate the different combinations of resolution scaling too.

Very nice of you. Thank you.

Insane. Thank you very much.

Nice to see such great interest!

I just wanted to add that the upscaled images use bicubic interpolation as that's what my RX 570 4GB does. I assumed every modern card would do that so I didn't explicitly mention it. However, when nVidia released the gamescom driver with integer scaling, they told that their GPU scaling would be bilinear and that's a bit more blurry .

Speaking of this driver, it also added another sharpening filter to FreeStyle. I'm sure they probably use something already present in ReShade but no way for me to be certain. Would anyone post an unscaled on/off pic?

Lastly, here are some benchmark results to put the sharpening filters and GPU upscaling vs ingame resolution scaling into perspective (1% and 11% Lows/Highs and average displayed frames with an i7 4770 16GB using DX12 if possible. Manual test runs, so differences below 2-3% might be none.):

Fantastic !!! Is it just possible to display, near the game title, the API used ?

Ahh, yes. I used DirectX 12 for Metro and Resi (Ethan only has 11) as this is around 1-2% better on my hardware and the fps don't fluctuate any more or less compared to DX11.

Ohh interesting - I'll definitely contact you when I next either update Lumasharpen or create a new sharpen shader.

BTW - also try Lumasharpen set to "Fast" (This only uses 3 samples instead of 5) and maybe also wide and pyramid. The last two should be just as fast as normal, but they look slightly different.

Wide is less sensitive to noise, and Pyramid is a bit harsh in the look (which I don't like but some do)

BTW I think I can make CAS faster by making a DX10+ mode (it can autodetect this so no need for an option) and then use GatherRed, GatherGreen and GatherBlue to grab 4 pixel using only 3 samples. This should bring CAS down from 9 samples to 8. So slightly faster.

Also - is webp lossless? I seem to recall it's not and if that is true then you should probably switch to PNG which is lossless.

CeeJay.dk wrote: Ohh interesting - I'll definitely contact you when I next either update Lumasharpen or create a new sharpen shader.

BTW - also try Lumasharpen set to "Fast" (This only uses 3 samples instead of 5) and maybe also wide and pyramid. The last two should be just as fast as normal, but they look slightly different.

Wide is less sensitive to noise, and Pyramid is a bit harsh in the look (which I don't like but some do)

BTW I think I can make CAS faster by making a DX10+ mode (it can autodetect this so no need for an option) and then use GatherRed, GatherGreen and GatherBlue to grab 4 pixel using only 3 samples. This should bring CAS down from 9 samples to 8. So slightly faster.

Also - is webp lossless? I seem to recall it's not and if that is true then you should probably switch to PNG which is lossless.

WEBP is lossy, its an equivalent to JPG, its supposed to be a successor to reduce file size while maintaining quality.

@CeeJay.dk

Thanks for the additional info. I only looked briefly at those settings and didn't saw huge differences so I kept it at normal thinking it should be the best quality/performance mix, but less noise sensitive definitely sounds good. I also thought that one setting per filter would be enough for the start but I actually considered adding some info to the text above like: "Please contact me if you are the creator of one shader and feel like the chosen settings misrepresent its capabilities." :^D


@both

WebP supports lossy and lossless (though it is very limited in choosing color formats and bit depth) and I decided to use it with a "near_lossless" setting at 60. First, it's (at least for me) totally indistinguishable, even when looking closely and doesn't exhibit any artifacts when zooming whilst being impressively smaller (this WebP screenshot is only 41% the size of the original PNG ). Second, I didn't thought many people are going to watch the images, so I could save some space on my Google Drive and the comparison page would load faster. ^^ But yes, truly lossless is better when wanting to edit the files later or subtract one from the other, so I probably should change that.

If filesize is important then check out Pingo : css-ig.net/

It's the best tool I have ever seen to optimize image filesize.

It can reduce the size of your PNGs or WebP images in lossless mode.
It can do lossy too but for an image quality comparison that is not wise.

Hello Matt Gore and thank you for trying Smart Sharp.

Let me talk about the weaknesses and benefits of Smart Sharp. As by the latest shader update on 8/31/2019.

In some instances, it will cause a little more hallowing as compared to AMD CAS. Due to the type of blurring used for it's Unsharp Mask.
Depth Buffer adjustments are necessary for smart sharp to give the sharpen effect a gradual decrease and hopefully not at all in the sky.
Because who wants sharp clouds right? This is a good thing and a bad thing. Since this means to show Smart_Sharp.fx in the best light it needs proper depth buffer support.

Smart Sharp should lend itself to better "Pop" when it comes to detail in texture. As well to intentional haloing done by the Depth Cues Toggle helps with pop in some games, hopefully in a subtle way.

Depth Cues Is a completely optional adjustable intentional haloing used to enhance AO/shading effects in-game or video.

No Sharpen Base Image.
https://pasteboard.co/IvjN1RF.bmp
Sharpen Base Image
https://pasteboard.co/Ivs21sI.bmp
Sharpen With Depth Cues
https://pasteboard.co/Ivs2XUE.bmp
Debug View - Top Left is the Contrast Masking -Top Right is Z_Buffer-Bottom Left is the Application of sharpen-Bottom Right is a Preview of sharpening
https://pasteboard.co/Ivs3Faq.bmp
Debug View of Depth Cues
https://pasteboard.co/Ivs4MrP.bmp

It'd be nice to see a comparison between the new NVCP image sharpening setting and ReShade's sharpening filters, namely CAS and LumaSharpen.

Yeah there's a comparison website somewhere posted here that covers most of the ReShade sharpen shaders and Smart includes at least parts of CAS which can be customized further in all kinds of ways but I have no idea what NVIDIA is utilizing although I would assume it's something that is also a bit dynamic in terms of gamma or well adaptive I suppose though depth and other stuff is probably kept more simplified both to make it less complex and overall compatible without requiring extra stuff or game specific profile workarounds but also for performance while allowing control over the sharpness itself whereas CAS from AMD keeps a default value.
(There was a DSR unlocker, wonder if there will be a NVSharp unlocker though higher values might already push into display issues and ringing artifacts and all that.)


EDIT: Github activity from BlueSkyKnight looks like there has been a lot of work on Depth3D and the related helper or compatibility shader of sorts for control and some settings ("some") might be compatible with NVIDIA's opening up of using ReShade effects too although I hear there's at least some check on these as to not modify or add stuff that might give MP advantages I assume is the primary reason behind it.
(So no throwing in a crosshair shader or making the game look like it's just drawing the depth buffer.)

Seems the newest version is pending inclusion to the main ReShade shader repository too.
Fun to check what's happening both for the main source code Github page and the shaders and related repositories.

It'd be nice to see a comparison between the new NVCP image sharpening setting and ReShade's sharpening filters, namely CAS and LumaSharpen.

I don't have an nVidia GPU so I can't do the comparisons myself but I found someone taking a few comparison shots for me. The new FreeStyle sharpening looked very similar to CAS and espicially to LumaSharpen but with way more graining. There is also an "Ignore Film Grain" slider but this should be called selective blur instead because that's what it actually is. Together, the graining can be roughtly as unnoticable as with CAS or LumaSharpen but nVidia's way is thus obviously a bit more taxing.