First off, "Temporal Filtering" sounds like something the Enterprise would do before trying to figure out how to get back to their own time after being flung into the 26th Century by Q, or something. But it sounds like it's an interesting new piece of technology that Ubisoft has been baking into their PC games for a bit now. Normally I would dismiss stuff like this as marketing fluff, but I actually learned about it from Nvidia's page on the game, and they list some interesting "free" boosts in framerate at certain resolutions:

I haven't tried it yet (honestly I've only had time to play the game for around 30 minutes), but I'm eager to give it a whirl tonight. I mostly play at 1080p because I'm still on a 970, but if I can get up to 60 fps at 1440p without knocking all the detail settings down, that'd be...good.

Anyone try fooling around with this yet?

Hopefully it's better then Temporal AA :P

Temporal Filtering

If you're interested in graphics technology, you've probably heard a lot of talk about "checkerboard rendering" in relation to the PlayStation 4 Pro in recent weeks. This new, upgraded PlayStation 4 is promoted as being capable of 4K graphics, and given a lower-fidelity game it most certainly is. In high-fidelity games, however, it has to use a clever workaround called "checkerboard rendering" to achieve a higher-resolution image without tanking the framerate.

In simplified terms, checkerboard rendering upscales the resolution from 1920x1080 to 3840x2160, and uses data from the previous frame to create new detailed pixels that fill in the blanks between the pixels that were upscaled, avoiding the blurriness that would otherwise occur. The result is then further improved with other techniques, and smoothed out with anti-aliasing.

This same principle was already achieved in a similar fashion in last year's Rainbow Six Siege, which introduced us to what Ubisoft calls "Temporal Filtering" (page 45-65). That first-take on the idea rendered the same number of depth samples as a full-resolution 1920x1080 picture, but only half the shaded samples, improving performance at the expense of image quality. This manifested as a reduction in the quality and visibility of Ambient Occlusion shadowing, increased shader aliasing, decreased lighting and shading fidelity, and a loss of fidelity on smaller game elements, such as leaves, grass, visual effects and minute pieces of geometry.

In the year since Ubisoft has greatly improved their implementation of the technique, avoiding almost all of the previously-observed pitfalls. Such is the level of improvement, in fact, and the performance of the game with Temporal Filtering enabled, you can increase the resolution from 1920x1080 to 2560x1440 whilst simultaneously benefiting from a faster framerate and improved image quality. Take a look for yourself in our interactive comparisons below.

I've tried it in R6: Siege, turning it on and off and on again...I can't see any loss in image quality...but it boosts fps by a good ~30%

but apparently you're a noob if you use it so I don't.

This is super interesting and makes me even more excited to boot up Watch Dogs 2 for the first time. I can't wait to observe this first hand on my 1440p 144hz Monitor.

I noticed small deviations in quality with this on wd2. With temporal filtering on, textures were not quite as sharp and things like lights and shadows were more faint. I was only able to tell these difereneces by taking screen caps in the same spot with it off and on (I'll try to remember to post those when I get home). It should be totally fine to use temporal filtering but the graphics snob in me couldn't let it go.

Edit For Photos:

With Temporal Filtering:

Without:

I fooled around with it a bit last night on Watch Dogs 2. I'm playing on 1080p on a i5-4690K and a GTX 980. I didn't play too long, but I couldn't really tell a difference with the image quality. I tried playing with 2x TXAA on Very High pre-set quality, and it tanked my FPS. So I tried the same settings with the Temporal Filtering, and I could see a little blurriness, but the game ran super smooth. I only have a 1080p monitor, so does anyone know if I could bump the in-game resolution up to 1440p for the Temporal Filtering, and then it outputs 1080p?

It's great to see techniques like this and dynamic resolution scaling making their way to PC — I'm playing more and more PC games in 4K and one of the frustrating things is that, even with a GTX 1080, it's difficult to strike a balance between resolution, rendering quality and frame rate. Dynamic resolution scaling in games like Gears and Forza solves this; I can jack up the settings, enable dynamic resolution scaling (which, in Gears 4, usually results in an internal resolution of around 3200x1800; appreciably better than 1440p and not a million miles from 4K) and still hit 60Hz fairly comfortably.

It also allows for razor sharp user interfaces, something I really appreciate. In games that don't support dynamic resolution scaling, I'll often spit out 1440p to my TV and have that scale up to 4K; this usually results in a significantly cleaner image than you'd otherwise get at 1080p*. An unfortunate side effect of this, however, is that 2D content like UI elements tend to scale poorly. Fortunately, dynamic resolution scaling fixes this problem — games can render the UI natively at 4K and still scale the game's internal resolution up and down as performance fluctuates.

I hope more developers start following Microsoft and Ubisoft's lead in implementing creative rendering solutions because it makes the path to 4K and beyond much more viable.

* Depending on the game and display scaler, the final image can be a little soft; this can be improved a little by injecting something like SweetFX and using the lumasharpen shader.

I tried this last night and was able to run it at 1440p with a decent framerate (the nVidia FPS overlay doesn't appear in the game, for some reason), but I'm not quite sure the performance hit is worth it from running it at 1080 with more options turned on. More research required!

I messed around with this quite a bit over the weekend, and I'm not too big of a fan. The performance increase was noticeable, but image quality decreased immensely. Objects in the distant looked super blurry and kind of see through. You know how in open world games everything is made up of "dots," so if you walk through a bush, it disappears with a bunch of dots? That's what objects at a distance looked like: they were starting to disappear. This was running the game on very high settings.

I ended up turning off Temporal Filtering and set the post-processing AA to FXAA and set the game pre-set quality on high. I'm running the game at a steady 60 FPS now, with some dips to the 50s when I'm driving. I'm on an i5-4690K and a GTX 980. I'm still pretty happy with the port considering what this year has been like for other AAA PC ports.

Outside of PC performance, I'm enjoying the game way more than I anticipated.

Not to highjack the thread, but I didn't think it deserved a new one and it's graphics related...

Anyone download the ultra texture pack as well? Steam reviews are glowing saying it looks "amazing!!!" but also mention it tanks ur FPS. I downloaded the pack, it says its installed and I have an option to set textures to Ultra. Yet, I really can't see a difference in game nor did it hurt my FPS. Makes me wonder if it's even working. Anyone have it working and can see a difference?