AMD MUST Fix FSR Upscaling - DLSS vs FSR vs Native at 1080p

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Video Index
00:00 - Welcome to Hardware Unboxed
02:14 - Cyberpunk 2077
03:50 - Ratchet & Clank Rift Apart
05:18 - Dead Space
05:57 - Spider-Man Miles Morales
06:47 - Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3
07:51 - Star Wars Jedi Survivor
08:30 - Hogwarts Legacy
09:34 - Starfield
10:34 - The Talos Principle 2
11:20 - Assassin's Creed Mirage
12:04 - Performance
13:47 - Final Thoughts

AMD MUST Fix FSR Upscaling - Nvidia DLSS vs AMD FSR vs Native at 1080p

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Outro music by David Vonk/DaJaVo

[Lyazhka]

it's funny that modded fsr version in cyberpunk actually fixes ghosting and did it even before official implementation

[thDragoon]

To the people asking why this video is relevant - AMD is now ubiquitous in the gaming world. Look at how many companies are using their architectures in their PCs/handhelds/consoles. They fall into the perfect Venn Diagram of: Being a single source for both CPU and GPU hardware, having a very *mature* set of architectures (cough, Intel graphics), and actually being willing to be aggressive on price. Nvidia doesn’t care enough to compete much where AMD seems to shine, they’d rather make bank in the AI space. So, if AMD is the only real option for the majority of gaming machines outside the home built PC space, they’re the only company that needs to be convinced of anything. And a video like this is the only way to make the point. If it takes multiple reminders over the course of a couple years, so be it. Yes, Tim is beating a dead horse, but that’s AMD’s fault.

[josejuanandrade]

How about better optimize games so we dont freaking need to use upscaling methods to play in basic 1080p resolution?!

[soulshinobi]

This also served as a good example of the failings of TAA, which shows ghosting similar to FSR in some scenes like the stickers on the shop door in the Spiderman section.

[arthurbonds]

Regarding whether DLSS is 'running a more taxing algorithm' to get better image quality, the video states it's not the case, but at the same time states that the only difference of DLSS and FSR is 'hardware acceleration vs generic shaders'. HW Acceleration is exactly that - it speeds up something that could be done in shader cores. It's very likely that the algorithm used by DLSS is more complex (thus it catches more of the corner cases that FSR misses), so it leverages HW Accel to reduce the negative performance impact.

One can see something similar with XeSS's fallbacks - the best XeSS algo uses Intel XMX cores and may achieve visual results closer to DLSS (compared to FSR), but the DP4a fallback suffers from a significantly larger performance hit VS the XMX path. Speed and quality has always been inversely proportional, which is why DLSS was initially seen on launch as a kind of black magic because it got so close to native while still offering so much more performance. We now know it really isn't free - it truly had to leverage additional compute resources to make that a reality.

[winjr]

One interesting comparison would be between TSR and FSR. They are both temporal upscalers that don't use AI.
TSR is only available on UE5 games, but there are already a few available to make a small comparison.

[fVNzO]

I'd say any upscaling isn't worth using at just 1080p. At low resolutions the base res is just horrendous. It starts to look decent at 1440p.

[VelcroSnake]

I always consider upscaling from 1080p to be an odd choice. As I see it, if you're GPU isn't strong enough to game at 1080p, chances are your CPU is probably not strong enough to have notable gains from dropping to 1080p to a lower resolution. For the most part, while FSR may not be as good as DLSS, I've been happy with it from 1440p and up, and it's not the garbage fire the internet often tells me it is.

[andrewcross]

Where available please include DLAA / FSR native so you can compare the built in TAA to NVs TAA to AMD TAA at the same input resolution. It also allows you to see how much of the IQ delta is from the TAA method used and how much is from the upscaling.

[glenwaldrop]

In Cyberpunk 2077 2:59 the ghosting is in the original image, it is of course worse in the upscaling versions. I noticed similar behavior with shadows in Days Gone, no upscaling. I'm not denying the upscaled versions look worse, I'm saying that any issues in the original image will be amplified by the upscaler.

It seems like an engine issue that was well hidden but made apparent by the upscaler.

[WickedRibbon]

I'd love to see more games offer a 'render resolution slider', like we see in Starfield.

This'll allow users to find their own balance between resolution and performance, while still being able to take advantage FSR2's upscaling features.

I personally ran Starfield at 1440p + optimised settings + 75% render scale with FSR2 - and it looked great. 75% was above the standard "FSR Quality" (65% I believe), which allowed for cleaner image quality with only a minor hit to performance.

At 1440p or lower, the standard resolution scale of "FSR2 Quality" might actually be too aggressive for most games.

[PixelShade]

AMD has ALREADY delivered solutions fixing sub-pixel shimmering (for powerlines, fences, etc.), smearing, and disocclusion artifacts with FSR 2.2, you just assign reactive-, composition- or transparency masks to those objects, and you can also "pixel-lock" certain sub-pixel detail.... heck CDPR added a reactive mask to the car, fixing ghosting in Cyberpunk v.1.61 completely, but then it was removed and the motion blur re-introduced for FSR in the v1.62-DLSS3 patch. Community-made injected version of FSR fixes ghosting as well (you can assign a autogenerated helper function if you don't manually add "masks" to the game, it isn't as accurate, but still helps out), so really, it's more a matter of how much effort developers put into the FSR implementation compared to DLSS, rather than it being an indicator of the technology's capability in itself. I have played around with FSR SDK, and I would argue that the biggest difference is that it lacks the last temporal smoothing passes that DLSS has (due to AMD not relying on specialized cores for accelerated matrix calculations). Otherwise the techniques function similarly. Ultimately DLSS will always yield a more stable image, but in a scenario where FSR2.2 has a feature-complete implementation, it actually gets rid of many issues that still plague the DLSS's machine learned algorithm (like ghosting and oclussion artifacts).

These videos ultimately compare "implementations" rather than "technology". The reason being that these games-, and side-by-side comparison doesn't offer a like-for-like scenario. However, if the video is looking at the current state of DLSS vs FSR in games I would still argue that that's a valid goal. Especially since it spotlights the current gaming landscape and how these technologies have been utilized by developers regardless of capabilities. I just think that the wording used throughout the video is kind of misleading, as this is NOT the state of the technology itself. And the headline about AMD "needing to fix FSR" is also kind of wrong since AMD already fixed most complaints, however developers have chosen not to anything about their current implementations. What AMD could do, and something I wish they did, is to offer a temporal smoothing pass in the temporal pipeline (like DLSS has) that can be toggled on/off. That way the quality can be more on-par with DLSS at the cost of performance. But then it will be more an issue of FSR performing worse, which isn't a good marketing point of course. But I think it would cool down the "quality debate" a whole lot

[Navi_xoo]

DLSS is genuinely important. Sony is making their own tech to compete with it. I was surprised AMD didn't figure out AI upscaling with RX 7000. They only recently announced they were even working on it.

[ymiround]

For me the main perk in having RTX cards for 1080p rig is an unspoken DLDSR
Playing Cyberpunk with DLDSR x2, 25 + DLSS Balance on high preset was a treat. Much more crispier image than native 1080p

[referencestudioproductions]

When FSR 2.0 released I was ecstatic, and happy with the base quality for an initial release. However they haven’t meaningfully improved it since, even after launching frame gen, and the quality just isn’t good enough to justify using it.

[aladdin]

How about demanding more raw fps from gpu vendors instead of getting conditioned by them to upscaling.

[Crysalis-jdub]

I always have issues with any upscaling technique since I almost always tend to notice artifacts that I find really ugly. What I often do now when I use upscaling with my RX 7900XT to get very high FPS at (upscaled) 4K resolution is to use the driver integrated RSR (Radeon Super Resolution). While image quality might still be up to debate I found that surprisingly really annoying artifacts are less common and in some titles (Dead Space) it offers clearly better results than the in game FSR. In games like Cyberpunk and Remnant 2 it is also better in my opinion. This is also partially explained by the fact that the driver option allows upscaling from 1800P to 2160P (kind of ultra quality mode). I have consistently good to very good results with this. Maybe it would be interesting to test this as well for you guys at Hardware Unboxed :).

[Strale]

Id rather drop the game than have to rely on upscaling to get playble fps at 1080p medium.

[OdiumDei]

What i would be very interested in would be a comparison/discussion of 1080p native vs 1440p DLSS/FSR.

What i mean is a genuine discussion if it is better for the final gaming experience to spend more on a 1440p VRR Display and a GPU that is only able to deliver good FPS at 1440p utilizing upscaling or to get a 1080p VRR Display (which is cheaper, so you can get a better GPU) and render at 1080p native?

[djayjp]

Some of these issues with FSR can be mitigated somewhat by reducing the over sharpening that it applies by default.