AMD's FSR 3 Frame Generation Analyzed

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Video Index
00:00 - Welcome to Hardware Unboxed
01:08 - What is AMD FSR 3?
03:24 - FSR 3 Frame Pacing Issues
10:24 - FSR 3 Image Quality vs DLSS 3
18:38 - FSR 3 Latency and Performance
23:29 - Final Thoughts

Has AMD Destroyed DLSS 3? - FSR 3 Frame Generation Analyzed

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Outro music by David Vonk/DaJaVo

[elheber]

I'd love to see an analysis of gameplay footage deleting half the frames and using only the odd synthetic frames, so are how the artifacts look on their own in real time.

[Zordonzig]

I can only hope AMD and game devs get better with FSR3 over time. We really really need AMD to be competitive.

[keyboard_g]

Frame generation. The less you need it, the better it is.

[notacopa]

In case people don’t know, AMD fixed the VRR issue with the most recent beta drivers

[eyeOfAC]

They got the optical flow thingy working on compute, and reasonably well too. That’s the main point, the rest is just teething problems for new tech. This was supposed to be impossible without hardware support, as Nvidia put it. I’m impressed

[BigHeadClan]

I recall Nvidia frame gen also having teething issues when it first came out.

Ill give AMD its chance to get its ducks in a row with the technology.

If nothing else I very much appreciate they included it on nearly all cards on the market not just their latest generation.

[thaddeus]

Don't know what Tim is talking about, but from footage he represented i see better sharpness and fine detail on FSR3 side compared to blurry image on DLSS3 side. So what kind of DLSS superiority he is talking about? FSR3 works even on GTX 10 series cards and does as good job as DLSS3 Which only works on 40 series.

[beat_g]

conclusion: when buying a new gpu, don't rely on the frame generation, buy the best one you are willing to afford that renders the highest fps natively

[ij]

Looking back in time, DLSS 3 didn't have a smooth launch either. I vaguely remember visual artifacts especially with UI and some other issues.
FSR3 is more interesting simply for the fact that it's not hardware locked, hell it'll even run on igpus

[bournechupacabra]

Given that AMD has nailed the quality and overhead aspects of frame generation, I'm optimistic that fixing the anti-lag and frame pacing issues won't be too difficult. They clearly released a beta version of the feature and called it a full release. But once those issues are sorted out it will be great.

I think FSR will always be behind in terms of upscaling image quality but as long as they are close enough I think that's a big win

[dragojess]

Hot take: requiring a high base framerate to work well is a good thing, it discourages devs using fsr3 to make up for poor framerates, it only enhances the experience on an already good enough framerate

[rickgear]

I won't lie, I am legit impressed with FSR3/FG. While certainly not as good as DLSS3/FG, I've seen enough that I can say Radeon owners aren't getting a drastically inferior experience. FSR3 could definitely use a few more tweaks and will likely get better with time, but those multi-$100 premiums for nvidia GPUs start to look less worth paying for. I don't disagree that it's not ready for primetime, but as a preview, I like what I see.

Well done AMD. The tech certainly isn't as good as DLSS3/FG, but that makes sense given how much of a premium you have to pay to take advantage of it.

[ItsDillan]

This is going to be like G-Sync.
AMD will lag behind in engineering a viable alternative that's able to be used by a broader group of hardware, the whole time Nvidia will claim that it's just "not possible" for them to use *Insert newest DLSS here* on certain hardware. Eventually AMD will catch up and Nvidia will have to change their marketing strategy or look like idiots.

AMD occasionally manage to do some really interesting things. FSR now, but mantle before was so forward thinking that a lot of the API was supposedly absorbed into Vulkan and DX12.

[McMaxW]

I appreciate the detailed analysis... but I'm sure I would not notice 90% of these issues while gaming.

[ClaudeHomml]

Did you mistakenly switch the FSR3 and DLSS videos? I found it rather confusing that just about every videoclip labeled FSR3 had obviously more detailed and sharper textures, than the DLSS-labeled ones. While the commentary was saying the exact opposite. Even through youtube-codec the DLSS textures looked obviously lower resolution and way more blurry.

[KeepAnOpenMind]

The reason upscaling works the best at maximum refresh rates is simple: the motion vectors velocity is less the higher the number of frames is. The frames are predicted based on the velocity and the greater it is, the harder it is to predict (correctly).

[mycosys]

Seems like a pretty promising public beta to me, i look forward to the full/FSR3.1 release on Starfield

[Drovek]

I played around a bit in the Forspoken demo and actually thought it looked fine, though my 6950XT was indeed maxing out my monitor with FrameGen.

[rsherhod]

I hope Nvidia allow devs to separate the UI rendering pipeline, like AMD has.

[TheGoncas]

One thing that I don't see people talking about enough is how EXPENSIVE the DLSS FG pass is. Doing the math, it costs 5ms at 4K on a RTX 4090, while FSR3 only costs 2.4ms. It's LESS THAN HALF, and it makes a difference in the frame rates, especially at high refresh rates! If AMD can do it, Nvidia should optimize the DLSS3 cost too.