The Elder Scrolls Online will be the first game with Nvidia's new DLAA tech
During a livestream showcasing the Deadlands DLC zone coming to The Elder Scrolls Online, as well as changes being added in its next base-game patch, creative director Rich Lambert mentioned a new tech from Nvidia would debut in the MMO: Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing, or DLAA. It's like DLSS (which The Elder Scrolls Online is also getting), but instead of running at a lower resolution to get a framerate boost while using AI to upscale everything so it still looks shiny, DLAA runs at native resolution while using that same deep learning for extra edge-smoothing.
"It's the same kind of concept," Lambert said, about 51 minutes into the livestream. "You won't get a performance boost out of this, but what you will get is absolutely incredible anti-aliasing." If you want to try out DLAA it'll be coming to the public test server, after which it will become an option alongside DLSS whenever update 32 goes live. A decent Nvidia GPU will be necessary, of course. "You need the RTX 2000 or RTX 3000 series cards in order to take advantage of it," Lambert said.
Lead graphics engineer Alex Tardif brought up the DLAA debut in a Twitter thread following the stream. "Huge thanks to the team at NVIDIA for humoring and then supporting us releasing this when we brought up and tested this hijacking of their DLSS tech into its own thing", he wrote. "It's not something every game would need, but for ESO it just made sense."
Update 32 will also bring changes to combat, which are intended to dial back some of the game's recent power creep, and especially the continued dominance of builds based around critical hits. As a post on the official forum put it, there's going to be "a hard cap to Critical Damage and Healing." Other alterations will be about "improving proc set balance and continuing the hybridization improvements from previous updates".