- 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 out top by far, with FSR falling behind it, and native rendering too — but we need to be careful about what conclusions we draw
Which is 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, well, think again — because a vote held by a tech site has crowned Nvidia the clear winner here.
Tom’s Hardware flagged up the intriguing test conducted by ComputerBase, with the readers of the German website being presented with three side-by-side videos.
These showed off 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 techs were running in ‘quality’ mode (rather than ‘performance’), and native 4K had TAA applied (temporal anti-aliasing, which smooths out jagged edges).
Six games were involved here, with votes registered over two weeks. This was a blind test — meaning the videos were presented unlabelled, so biases towards AMD or Nvidia could be set aside — and readers had to choose which they thought looked best.
This was purely judged on image quality, and you could only pick a winner (no second places). However, if you couldn’t tell any real difference between the choices, you could vote to say it was a tie and they were all equivalent.
The end result was a big victory for Nvidia, with DLSS snagging 48.2% of the total vote (6,700 opinions were registered, by the way). Native rendering was in second place with 24% of respondents preferring that, with FSR lagging considerably behind on 15%.
Around 12.8% of those who took the test effectively abstained, as they couldn’t see any meaningful difference between the three.
The following games were tested: Anno 117, Arc Raiders, Cyberpunk 2077, Horizon Forbidden West, Satisfactory, and The Last of Us Part II.
Breaking down the results for the individual games showed some clear wins for Nvidia, which notably secured 60.9% of the vote in Satisfactory, and 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 out native rendering (just). Here Nvidia picked up 34.4% of the vote versus 32.4% for native 4K, with AMD hitting its lowest percentage at just 10.6%.
Interestingly, Cyberpunk 2077 was something of an outlier in that it was the only game to have considerable doubt around respondents’ assessments of the best quality, with 22.6% being unable to make a call, and voting them all equivalent. With all the other games, the abstainers were in the 8% to 12% ballpark, meaning roughly one in 10 — but in the case of Cyberpunk 2077 approaching one in four gamers were unable to tell.
AMD’s best result was for The Last of Us Part II where FSR captured 25.3% of the vote, but it was still in last place here, falling just behind native rendering on 25.9%, with Nvidia winning with 40.9% of the vote (its weakest showing aside from Cyberpunk 2077).
Analysis: a measure of just how good upscaling has become
This is a really interesting set of stats, and it shows just how much upscaling has supercharged contemporary 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 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 the upscalers. However, AMD has received considerable acclaim for the strides it has taken forward with FSR 4, but that doesn’t come across clearly here.
As ComputerBase points out, though, we need to be careful about concluding that AMD FSR is worse than native rendering based on these results, as only one pick was made — for the best quality — and second or third place weren’t taken into account. Having a full picture of rankings in that respect 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 watch them via 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 watered down the comparison here.
This is clearly a big win for Nvidia, then, and a healthy prod for AMD in terms of needing 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 a lot of gamers sold on the benefits of Nvidia DLSS over and above native rendering — but this test underlines just how good Team Green’s tech is in terms of providing a more detailed, superior image quality.
If you’re wondering where Intel’s XeSS got to in this comparison, it was likely ruled out due to running the tests at 4K — and the lack of an appropriate high-end Intel Arc GPU in that regard — plus the fact that a fourth solution would’ve complicated matters considerably for ComputerBase (and the viewers judging). Discrete Arc graphics cards are, of course, very much a niche proposition anyway.
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