- ComputerBase ran a comparison between DLSS, FSR and native 4K
- Readers watched videos of all three and voted for the best image quality
- Nvidia’s DLSS came a long way, with FSR falling behind, and native rendering as well – but we have to be careful about what conclusions we draw
What’s best for image quality: Nvidia’s DLSS, AMD’s FSR, or not using any upscaling at all and running your games at native 4K resolution? If you thought native was the best choice, think again – because a poll conducted by a tech site has crowned Nvidia the clear winner here.
Tom’s Hardware highlighted the exciting test conducted by ComputerBase, where readers of the German website were presented with three side-by-side videos.
These showed DLSS 4.5, FSR 4 (Redstone) and native 4K, and viewers were asked to vote for the video that offered the best image quality. Both upscaling technologies ran in ‘quality’ mode (instead of ‘performance’) and native 4K had TAA applied (timed anti-aliasing, which smooths out jagged edges).
Six matches were involved here, with votes recorded over two weeks. This was a blind test – meaning the videos were presented unlabeled so biases towards AMD or Nvidia could be set aside – and readers had to choose which one they thought looked best.
This was judged purely on image quality and you could only pick one winner (no runners up). But if you couldn’t see any real difference between the choices, you could vote to say it was a tie and that they were all equal.
The end result was a big win for Nvidia, with DLSS getting 48.2% of the total votes (by the way, 6,700 opinions were recorded). Native rendering was in second place with 24% of respondents preferring it, with FSR lagging significantly behind at 15%.
About 12.8% of those who took the test abstained because they could see no meaningful difference between the three.
The following games were tested: Anno 117, Arc Raiders, Cyberpunk 2077, Horizon Forbidden West, Satisfactoryand The Last of Us Part II.
The breakdown of the results for the individual games showed some clear victories for Nvidia, which in particular secured 60.9% of the votes in Satisfactoryand 56.3% in Horizon Forbidden West.
Nvidia won with every single game, although the worst result for DLSS, which was in Cyberpunk 2077, still beat the original render (just). Here, Nvidia got 34.4% of the votes against 32.4% for native 4K, with AMD hitting its lowest percentage of only 10.6%.
Interestingly enough, Cyberpunk 2077 was something of an outlier in that it was the only game in question in respondents’ ratings of best quality, with 22.6% unable to make a call and voting them all to be equivalent. With all the other games, the holdouts were in 8% to 12% of the ballpark, which means about one in 10 – but in the case of Cyberpunk 2077 approaching one in four players was unable to tell.
AMD’s best result was for The Last of Us Part II with FSR capturing 25.3% of the vote, but it was still in last place here, falling just behind native rendering at 25.9%, with Nvidia winning with 40.9% of the vote (its weakest showing apart from Cyberpunk 2077).
Analysis: a measure of how well scaling has become
This is a really interesting set of stats and shows how much upscaling has left modern GPUs in terms of producing a better looking image than native rendering at 4K – and of course a frame rate boost too. (Although ‘quality’ obviously doesn’t give the same boost as ‘performance’ for DLSS or FSR).
It also reflects the broader sentiment you’ll find online, which is that DLSS is the reigning monarch of upscalers. However, AMD has received considerable credit for the progress it has made going forward with FSR 4, but that doesn’t come across clearly here.
As ComputerBase points out, however, we need to be cautious about concluding that AMD FSR is worse than native rendering based on these results, as only one choice was made – for best quality – and second or third place was not considered. Having a complete picture of rankings in that regard could have changed the overall results.
It’s also worth noting that the videos weren’t simply uploaded to YouTube, but ComputerBase readers had to download them from the site and watch them via Nvidia’s ICAT player. This was to ensure a higher quality level for the footage and avoid YouTube’s various compression antics which would have diluted the comparison here.
This is clearly a big win for Nvidia, and a healthy prod for AMD in terms of having to catch up more than Team Red has managed so far with the release of Redstone.
From browsing various online forums, you’ll see that there are already many gamers sold on the benefits of Nvidia DLSS beyond native rendering – but this test highlights just how good Team Green’s technology is at delivering a more detailed, superior image quality.
If you’re wondering where Intel’s XeSS came into this comparison, it was probably ruled out due to running the tests at 4K – and the lack of a suitably high-end Intel Arc GPU for that matter – plus the fact that a fourth solution would have complicated matters considerably for ComputerBase (and viewers, to judge). Discrete Arc graphics cards are of course very much a niche proposition anyway.
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