Did AMD Lie?? - FSR 3.1 vs DLSS vs XESS! In 4 Games, 7 GPUs

FSR 3.1 IS FINALLY HERE!!! And AMD claimed it to be bringing huge improvements to FSR 2 upscaling, which is very much needed. Upscaling is becoming more and more important in our games and Nvidia's DLSS has pretty much been the king. However, even Intel burst on to the scene with XESS and has been putting up extreme competition for AMD. AMD's FSR has been falling further behind, so did FSR 3.1 help?

I tested FSR 3.1 in 4 of the 5 games it is currently in against DLSS and XESS at different qualities. Also on 7 different graphics cards to see how the new performance stacks up just to be sure. Hope this helps! Let me know of any of your experiences in the comments, because this was a wild ride...

==JOIN THE DISCORD!==

0:00- Why Upscaling is important
1:20- State of FSR and what AMD claims
4:00- DLSS vs FSR 3.1 is interesting
11:09- Old FSR vs FSR 3.1 is confusing
17:33- XESS vs FSR 3.1 is wild
23:42- FSR 3.1 performance (FPS) vs others
25:40- Why does FSR 3.1 exist?
28:05- New FSR 3.1 Frame Generation stuff
29:25- ummmm... about FSR 3.1

[mark.]

Framegen and upscaling is nice to have and all but i just want devs to actually optimize their fucking games.

[konstantindimitrov]

1 minute and no "bro you fell off ahh" comment?

The comment section fell off.

[monsterboomer]

One day in the future, and that day will come, trust me, Nvidia will make you pay mothly subscribtion for DLSS.

[artistunknown]

Not a surprise that upscaling and framegen advances so slow, it probably hurts the sales of new and expensive GPUs in the market.

[lord_nemsis]

I hope they implement FSR 3.1 in the new Frostpunk game, they worked close with AMD and designed limited FP2 style GPU's

[hernanzambroni]

Nobody uses Performance mode unless you're playing in 4K. For 1440p or 1080p try to use Quality or Balance mode atleast.

[Accuaro]

AMDs biggest struggle are transparencies and particle ghosting.

[silvio]

Sorry Vex, I disagree with you on this (Personal opinion), I think Ancient Gameplays did a better comparison, FSR 3.1 is definitely better than 2.2 and I CAN TOTALLY SEE the difference while playing Horizon Forbidden West, it's much more stable. 1440p FSR Balance used to look terrible and now is decent and in QUALITY MODE I hardly even notice the difference from native res. Also, without zooming in and slowing down you won't even notice anything whatsoever because people just don't do that. Don't get me wrong, FSR 3.1 is not a game changer (It's not even using dedicated hardware), it still has flaws, DLSS is still better but it is becoming insignificant at this point.

[TheBlackAnomaly]

With this new technologies, games are slowly becoming like video streaming quality.

[Varil]

Honestly, yes, DLSS is still better, but the difference in quality, playing at least at 1440p Quality or even 1440p Balanced, is negligible. DLSS was the last thing that still kept me take Nvidia into consideration. Now that FSR is in practice at the same level of DLSS, Nvidia to me is irrelevant.

[FneWne]

Why not test quality mode? And also give us the impression you get when you’re not zoomed in three times and slowed down to 60%?

[VerSo]

The moment you have to slow down to show the oh so 'noticeable' differences you can ask yourself if dlss is really worth the additional tax we pay to Nvidia and you smartly avoid that part of the equasion. .
Both seemed fine to me and as you said may come up to personal preference here and there.
This kind of nitpicking is certainly not worth it here where the difference in price between nvidia and amd is a LOT bigger than in the US. (up to 200 Euro for similar performance) .
Maybe also mention that the RTX 3 series get left behind

[Dr.Mmmmmm]

XeSS shows how Intel handle the upscaling so well in a short time.

[FneWne]

Why not test quality mode? And also give the impression you get when you’re not zoomed in three times and slow down to 60%?

[kendric_BUF]

cool comparison video, vex. appreciate the time and effort you put into collecting all this photage/data. personally i would only ever consider using "quality" mode with upscalers, mostly cause i think with "performance" mode they just haven't got there yet

[JasonChen]

It's sad that the upscaling quality doesn't improve, but the decoupling of upscaling and frame generation alone is worth the update.

[shadesofgrey]

I wish you had compared the higher settings too. The performance mode looks like crap on all upscalers. It's when you get to about 75% (i.e. 1080p->1440p) that it starts looking acceptable. For 720p->1440p I would probably prefer integer scaling over any of these upscalers and just pretend that I have a 720p display. It's only the most insane setup that would not be CPU bottlenecked at 720p, which would defeat the purpose of upscaling, since lowering resolution doesn't help your CPU.

[dogwithoutw]

I think you should have done 1080p to 1440p comparison because for the new improvements to show, there needs to be enough pixels to work on

[HumanGamer]

I'm still excited for it. Mainly for the vulkan support, and decoupled frame gen. This means that one mod that would let you convert dlss framegen to fsr framegen should now be possible for many more games such as Portal RTX, allowing my 3090ti to get framegen in it.

[seaneriksen]

think it was a mistake upscaling from 720 p