NIS Sharpening is broken on DirectX 11

[doodlum]

Since updating Streamline to the latest version, the NIS plugin does not work correctly. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

No errors will be reported by NIS. slEvaluateFeature will return sl::Result::eOk but no sharpening is applied.

Calling

		sl::NISOptions nisOptions{};
		nisOptions.mode = sl::NISMode::eSharpen;
		nisOptions.hdrMode = sl::NISHDR::eNone;
		nisOptions.sharpness = a_sharpness;

		if (SL_FAILED(result, slNISSetOptions(viewport, nisOptions))) {
			logger::critical("[Streamline] Could not set NIS options");
		}

Returns no errors either.

Probably unrelated to this bug report but the latest Streamline might have major performance issues as well, based on reports from many users of reduced performance since updating.

[jake-nv]

I’ve used it recently with dx12 (and maybe Vk), and NIS SDK shipped with dx11 support (https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/NVIDIAImageScaling). If this is broken it’s likely a regression.

[doodlum]

I think regression because the only changes I made were related to updating Streamline from 2.0.1 to latest. It would only seem to initialise for me if DLSS was enabled on startup then when disabled NIS would work.

[doodlum]

AMD users confirmed that even if NIS works for NVIDIA users it was broken for them.

[jake-nv]

Thanks for updating. I've created an internal issue for improved tracking. nvbug: 5518910

Do you have a link to any additional information that's been reported to you (is it broken on all AMD GPUs?)? I found an internal report from another developer saying NIS+DX11 was working, so need to make sure we've got all the details.

[doodlum]

I think it's broken on all AMD GPUs. But I did not have many AMD testers

[jake-nv]

We weren't able to repro this internally on two different AMD GPUs in SL 2.9. We'll need more specific, detailed repro instructions.

[doodlum]

Might as well just mark this as "fixed" then. I'm not sure that this is not entirely unrelated to https://github.com/NVIDIA-RTX/Streamline/issues/79 Per what devs typically do, we reserved NIS for DLSS, and used RCAS for FSR. The problem would be that for XESS it matters, but we are not currently using XESS and it has a lot of flickering present with NIS which does not occur with FSR anyway.