- ComputerBase performed 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 in first place by a long shot, with FSR falling behind and native rendering too, but we should be careful with the conclusions we draw.
Which is better for image quality: Nvidia’s DLSS, AMD’s FSR, or no upscaling at all and running games at native 4K resolution? If you thought native was the best option, think again, because a vote by a tech site crowned Nvidia the clear winner here.
Tom’s Hardware highlighted the intriguing test conducted by ComputerBase, in which readers of the German website were presented with three videos side by side.
These showed DLSS 4.5, FSR 4 (Redstone) and native 4K, with viewers asked to vote for the video that offered the best image quality. Both upscaling technologies ran in “quality” mode (rather than “performance”), and native 4K had TAA (temporal anti-aliasing, which smoothes out jagged edges) applied.
Six games 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 they thought looked better.
This was judged solely on image quality and only one winner could be chosen (no runners-up). However, if you couldn’t tell any real difference between the options, you could vote to say that there was a tie and that they were all equivalent.
The end result was a big win for Nvidia, with DLSS getting 48.2% of the total vote (6,700 opinions were recorded, by the way). Native rendering came in second, with 24% of respondents preferring it, while FSR fell considerably behind at 15%.
About 12.8% of those who took the test effectively abstained, as they could not see any significant difference between the three.
The following games were tested: Year 117, Arch Raiders, Cyberpunk 2077, Forbidden West Horizon, Satisfyingand The last of us Part II.
The breakdown of the individual game results showed some clear wins for Nvidia, which notably took 60.9% of the vote in Satisfyingand 56.3% in Forbidden West Horizon.
Nvidia won in every game, although the worst result for DLSS, which was in Cyberpunk 2077, beat native rendering (alone). Here, Nvidia got 34.4% of the vote versus 32.4% for native 4K, and AMD hit its lowest percentage with just 10.6%.
Curiously, Cyberpunk 2077 was an outlier, as it was the only game that had considerable doubts about respondents’ evaluations of the best quality: 22.6% could not make a call and voted them all equally. In all other games, abstentionists were in the range of 8% to 12%, that is, approximately one in 10, but in the case of Cyberpunk 2077 About one in four players couldn’t tell.
AMD’s best result was for The last of us Part II where FSR got 25.3% of the votes, but was still in last place here, falling just behind native rendering at 25.9%, with Nvidia winning with 40.9% of the votes (its weakest result other than Cyberpunk 2077).
Analysis: a measure of how good scaling has become
This is a really interesting set of statistics and shows how much the improvement has boosted contemporary GPUs in terms of producing a better looking image than native 4K rendering and of course an increase in frame rate as well. (Although “quality” obviously doesn’t provide 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 climbers. However, AMD has received considerable praise for the progress it has made with FSR 4, but that is not clear here.
However, as ComputerBase points out, we should be careful in concluding that AMD FSR is worse than native rendering based on these results, since only one choice was made (the best quality) and second or third place was not taken into account. Having a full picture of the rankings in that regard could have changed the overall findings.
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 view them through Nvidia’s ICAT player. This was to ensure a higher level of quality for the footage and avoid YouTube’s various compression antics, which would have diluted the comparison here.
So this is clearly a big win for Nvidia and a good boost for AMD in terms of needing to catch up with more than what the Red Team has achieved so far with the release of Redstone.
Browsing various online forums, you’ll see that there are already plenty of gamers convinced of the benefits of Nvidia DLSS on top of native rendering, but this test underlines just how good Team Green’s technology is in terms of providing superior, more detailed image quality.
If you’re wondering where Intel’s XeSS landed in this comparison, it was probably ruled out due to the tests being run at 4K (and the lack of a proper high-end Intel Arc GPU for that matter), plus the fact that a fourth solution would have complicated things considerably for ComputerBase (and the judging viewers). Discrete Arc graphics cards are, of course, a niche proposition anyway.
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