Upscale Upsell Part 2

If you've recently played a video game on a PlayStation 5 and/or an Xbox Series X, you've probably noticed how detailed the graphics looked and how smooth the motioned seemed. When it comes to the visual fidelity of video games, ensuring both a high degree of image detail (resolution) and smoothness of motion (framerate) simultaneously are essential, but that's very difficult for even modern PCs and gaming consoles to achieve.

Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is one of the latest games to support both DLSS and FSR.

Luckily, GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) manufacturers Nvidia and AMD have each developed a system specifically designed address this challenge (DLSS and FSR, respectively). However, which of these new technologies is the best?

Nvidia DLSS

DLSS was first released in 2019 and was first supported by Battlefield V.

Nvidia's DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) is a hardware-based system developed by Nvidia that is exclusive to Nvidia's RTX line of GPUs. DLSS allows games to render textures at a lower resolution (ex. 1080p) and then utilizes AI to upscale them to a target resolution (ex. 4K), an operation that is less computationally expensive than rendering textures natively at the target resolution, thus allowing more compute cycles to be allocated to maintaining framerate.

AMD FSR

FSR was first released in 2021 and was first supported by Farming Simulator 2022.

AMD's FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) works on essentially the same principle (except it uses a spatial upscaling algorithm rather than AI), with one major difference: FSR is a software-based system whereas DLSS is hardware-based. This means that while DLSS is restricted to GPUs that support it natively, FSR can be implemented on virtually any modern GPU.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, comparing the two technologies head-to-head is not straightforward. Tom's Hardware performed an in-depth test of the two technologies and found that while DLSS generally outperformed FSR, the facts that it is more computationally expensive than FSR and exclusive to RTX GPUs kept them from crowning it the undisputed victor of the matchup.

Not to be outdone, Intel released their own upscaler, XeSS, in 2022, though it has yet to see widespread adoption.

The good news is that nothing is stopping games from implementing both technologies (as well as Intel's upscaler called XeSS), and the expectation is that support for both will soon become the norm. Ultimately, the difference between DLSS and FSR isn't likely to be noticeable to the average consumer, so rest assured that regardless of which system the game you're playing utilizes, the visual experience is going to be a quality one.

Note: Both the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S use AMD GPUs, so only FSR is available on those platforms. The Nintendo Switch uses an Nvidia GPU, but it does not include support for DLSS.