Upscaling Face-Off: FSR 3.1 vs DLSS 3.7/ XeSS 1.3 - Has AMD Improved?

[@D.Enniss]

I'm mostly amazed at how good XeSS is looking Vs FSR

[@gametime4316]

and it's the "poor man" XESS DP4a that work on the same AMD cards the real XMX XESS looks way better.

[@Athos90]

0:47 0:48 j the pb CC. 1:29 1:30 k 1:51 1:54 1:21 in bv 1:15 b​@@gametime4316

[@kinghadu9611]

@@gametime4316 I have an ARC A750 and XESS looks incredible however the drivers for the card is trash and so is the performance on UE5 games, I am selling it next week already ordered a RX 6800 Core on sale

[@CASTSTONE]

Too bad performance gains are minimal on AMD.

[@techsamurai11]

Wait for PSSR - if Intel could do that with no knowledge of upscaling, then Sony being the foremost experts should be able to take on Nvidia.

[@suly3243]

6:17 that confetti shot really shows the limitations

[@TimfyGaming]

This is almost the only shot where it is indeed not acceptable.. Kinda sad DLSS wasent in that comparison shot...

[@jotarokujo.9667]

​@@TimfyGaming 10:14 fsr 3.1 and dlss comparison

[@CasualG-mer]

That...my god, it's...my god AMD, we're already at FSR 3 and AMD can't do confetti? DAYYUUMM

[@CasualG-mer]

​​@@jotarokujo.9667 This just shows, how much you are losing when your only choice is FSR... it's kinda insane when you think about it, the gap between AMD and Nvidia. That's probably why DF didn't even bother to try FSR 3.1's FG, because, we know it's gonna make it look worse than it already is, when the upscaler is this bad, then adding artificial frames is worse.

[@gametime4316]

that looks so sad... DLSS is not perfect @10:25 but it show all the particles. not bad consider it running at about 8 times less resolution ( X4 SSAA from 1440P is 5K and DLSS balance at 1440P is less than 900P ) edit, I calculated it 1440P balance DLSS is 1485X835 so 1.24M pixels 5K is 5120X2880 so 14.74M pixels so it's more like 12 times less pixels 😱😮😮

[@Wobbothe3rd]

We need a video comparing FSR3 frame generation to DLSS3 Frame Generation. AMD is claiming that they've made improvements to FG with 3.1 too.

[@alistermunro7090]

Do we really? DLSS FG > FSR FG.

[@12coco100]

​​@@alistermunro7090This is not the case. For some weaker gpus fsr frame gen is better. In ghosts at launch fsr looked better and gave more fps. Dlss frame gen could have lower latency due to reflex. But the actual frame gen its the same or fsr is better

[@Vicric]

@@ScyrousFX It's only very recently we've had decoupled FSR FG with FSR3 upscaling, not months. You couldn't compare it before because you're also comparing the differences in upscaling too.

[@srn7254]

I've used both for a while, and FSR3 had slightly better performance in some cases actually, but a lot more visual artifacts as well - shadows just didn't seem to match properly, and finer things like hair caused tons of ghosting when moving (especially annoying in third-person games). overall DLSS-FG feels a lot more stable and consistent for now, and the only noticeable issues were occasional HUD ghosting/glitching (which is mainly up to developers to properly fix AFAIK, since it only happens on certain titles whereas FSR3 artifacts were pretty much universal).

[@asysjr]

for people using DLDSR with frame gen, the FSR frame gen is best. I noticed the DLSS frame gen dont work properly when you are using with DLDSR to improve render resolution in 1080 ou 1440p monitors. The DLSS frame gen gives only 25 to 30% increase in FPS if you using alongside with DLDSR. But the FSR frame gen gives something like 70 to 80%.

[@toastbrot97]

3:12 holy DAMN does the super sampled image look crisp. Not surprising at all, but still a stunning sight since i don't think i've ever seen 4x SSAA 1440p before.

[@dreampillet]

6:12 is the one that blew my mind.

[@luizsouza2034]

14440p that's some crazy numbers

[@toastbrot97]

@@luizsouza2034 oh hanks, i didn't notice :D

[@Waffle4569]

It's like people forgot what stuff looked like before all this blurry temporal AA upscaling shit took over.

[@toastbrot97]

@@Waffle4569 So true. I can't even disagree if i tried to.

[@killermoon635]

Making small particle disappear is big deal for me

[@gattsgodai3]

You’re a high energy physicist too? /s

[@lupintheiii3055]

It was the case with Xess and DLSS too

[@Jas7520]

​@@lupintheiii3055you can trivially see in the side by side that isnt the case, at least for the confetti scene. DLSS keeps all the confetti visible and looks closest to the supersampled image.

[@VincentVanBro]

@@lupintheiii3055incorrect

[@DBTHEPLUG]

​Your 3 most recent comments on this channel are all anti-nvidia. Biased amd fanboy confirmed. @lupintheiii3055

[@daemonwhite3740]

Reportedly from TechPowerUp, AMD is starting a switch to become a "Software Company" Hopefully that means a more meaningful approach to the technology backing it's hardware.

[@Medeci]

Not a drop of that will reach gamers

[@G11-o7s]

Pretty sure they are focusing on AI like nvidia.

[@rob4222]

​@@MedeciThanks for the information, AMD employee 😂

[@techsamurai11]

That makes sense - software is where they lost the war against Nvidia. Their hardware is actually a better bargain. It's the software where Nvidia has beaten them.

[@3atFr35h]

FSR 3.1: now less worse

[@razorbackroar]

😂😂😂

[@VincentVanBro]

The poor man’s upscaler

[@EquiIi3R1um]

​@@VincentVanBroyes 7900xt is surely a poor man's gpu then

[@michahojwa8132]

At foundry - somehow they've forgotten they called 1440p fsrb completely unusable and now they have no problem with running it.

[@VincentVanBro]

@@EquiIi3R1um poor people are capable of making large purchases, they just typically make very poor decisions when they do

[@cromefire_]

One big question still remaing is: Why have so many games no motion vectors for particles? Wouldn't that immediately improve image quality for all upscalers?

[@CTBell-uy7ri]

I wonder this myself. My hunch is that generating the motion vector pass has a cost that they don’t want to spend. Also, motion vector buffers may be lower resolution and they miss it. In the end I think that game engines being built right now will have this in mind. But we may not see it for years yet. UE5 was made to be used with upsacalers, tho it didn’t quite nail it. I think we will only see more and better moves in that direction with time.

[@BlindTrustProject]

Particles are usually super optimised shader to privilege quantity over quality. Not surprised if it's not writing motion vectors. Plus if they use a transparent material, usually they don't write in the z buffer or motion vectors.

[@concinnus]

@@BlindTrustProject Costs are an issue, but consider also benefits. Most of the PC market is nVidia, and DLSS works well enough on vectorless particles, so why bother (unless the console version has FSR).

[@goob8945]

probably quite expensive and would require reworking a lot of the code

[@kzin602]

Particles are usually not objects in 3D space but a shader applied across a surface. In the cases where they do exist in space the actual 3D object is just a point and the particle you see is a type of shader driven glow or whatever, so there's no motion vector on the effect itself.

[@itsuadman]

Been waiting for this one, thanks for covering it Alex! That shot with the confetti with SSAAx4 just looks so much better than both 3.1 and 2.2, it's amazing how much particle detail is lost.

[@Chasm9]

And it's amazing how much of those particles does DLSS (and XeSS) retain despite rendering at 58% of 1440p resolution.

[@tcg2717]

0:07 A M deez nuts

[@kupokinzyt]

please win top comment, i heard deez too lol

[@Jun123]

😂

[@fttmvp]

HA!

[@slavboii420]

Goddammit I can't unhear it now, thank you

[@Angel7black]

Gottem

[@jrc-inspiration-studios]

I feel like quality modes at least need a mention? Adding 2min to the video time to briefly mention the quality modes and how they stack up would be very appreciated?

[@ArchieBunker11]

FSR quality is between DLSS balanced and performance, whilst also getting less performance gains than DLSS quality.

[@12coco100]

​@@ArchieBunker11 Your performance statement is not being truthful Hardware Unboxed did a video on performance between the upscalers, and using FSR 3.1 quality on a AMD gpu like the 7800xt. Gives the same amount of fps as DLSS quality with a 4070 in horizon. In Ghosts a 7800xt gives 5 more fps using FSR 3.1 quality mode. In Spiderman there's a difference in fps because AMD has worse RT performance so it got lower frames. In Miles Morales is where your correct. The 7800xt runs the same as the 4070 with RT without upscaling. But FSR 3.1 at quality gives you 104fps while the 4070 with DLSS quality gives you 117fps. You're correct with Miles Morales but other games where there is no RT like Ghosts and Horizon the FSR performance is the same as DLSS or better which you failed to mention by handpicking numbers.

[@ArchieBunker11]

@@12coco100 it is absolutely truth, watch the HUB video again, but try listening this time. Its literally timestamped “performance testing” Horizon fsr has less uplift, steve even says in HUB’s video for horizon “if amd users want to match the performance uplift of an Nvidia user using DLSS Quality, they need to use balanced”. Same story for spiderman, and miles morales. Ghosts was in between Dlss Q and balanced for uplift. Not to mention FSR looks far worse in comparison

[@HanSolo__]

@@ArchieBunker11 The difference in performance gains is not that important. The same goes for frame interpolation. Nobody needs 3x the base frames if the input stays low.

[@ArchieBunker11]

@@HanSolo__ If one card can use DLSS Quality that is already miles better than FSR Quality, AND it gets the performance gain that FSR balanced does, its an absurdly big advantage.

[@parasolo89]

DLSS is still the most reliable upscaler for now. Can only think of 1 time where DLSS has been implemented poorly and thats Jedi Survivor.

[@115zombies935]

Warframe is another. It’s sadly very broken there.

[@srn7254]

@@115zombies935 how so? I've been using the Quality preset since it pretty much dropped on WF, and it looks pretty much perfect at 4K - far better than native w/ TAA actually.

[@115zombies935]

@@srn7254 I got pretty horrendous artifacts in the star chart, and saw a lot of ghosting on particles compared to FSR. Which is really odd because in almost every other game it’s the opposite with DLSS having significantly less ghosting.

[@thomaswhite9160]

Dead space remake has tons of ghosting tho

[@no1DdC]

@@thomaswhite9160 Does it? I didn't notice any, although I played the game on a very slow monitor and on a card without frame generation capabilities.

[@The_Legend_Jonas]

love the use of the Glover soundtrack in the video 👍

[@no1DdC]

I knew it sounded familiar!

[@MadsterV]

I'd rather have a lower resolution than smears and blurs and trails and disappearing particles.

[@Nucleosynthese]

Nice to see improvements in FSR. It's incredible how good DLSS is though

[@RudeGerbil]

Nice to see AMD trying, but that fizzle is too noticeable and bothersome.

[@Chasm9]

Fizzling Shimmery Reconstruction

[@techsamurai11]

Price: 3 Trillion Dollars! AMD must have really deep pockets to afford losing 3 trillion dollars.

[@johnconnor5217]

It's an embarrasement that Intel can do better with their first generation of Xess than AMD with their 3rd generation of FSR

[@KingVulpes]

Because for some reason AMD won't do what Intel is doing and put their AI cores to use for Upscaling

[@MLWJ1993]

Likely because Intel & Nvidia have a massive advantage when it comes to monetary resources. They can easily invest some money in R&D to make this possible without really breaking a sweat about budget anytime soon.

[@gametime4316]

@@KingVulpes XESS DP4a not using the AI cores and looks way better on the same AMD cards.

[@KingVulpes]

@@gametime4316 Doesn’t it switch to AI acceleration on Intel GPUs tho?

[@gametime4316]

@@KingVulpes all version of XESS use AI, but not the AI cores (on AMD and nvidia) on intel cards its automatically change to the XMX version and run on the XMX "AI" cores

[@czbrat]

Me personally, I really hate that pixelated look FSR gives you in every game. I genuinely just prefer playing at a lower resolution and applying a sharpening filter like AMD's own CAS from Reshade.

[@12coco100]

rsr on amd software is really good. Instead of spending frames at 2160p, you set it to 1800p and use rsr to give you some clarity. Its pretty much what I do on every game and you get like 10 - 15 frames for free.

[@LewisHamiltonMSPR]

Same here, it's horrible. I play close to a 55" TV so FSR makes everything worse. When it's the only upscaler option in a game, I go without it.

[@leonthesleepy]

Would love to see 1440p quality comparisons too

[@selohcin]

I'm sure would.

[@respectfulremastersbymetal8336]

Man, DLSS is still so far ahead its not even funny. Glad FSR is getting better though.

[@miguelpereira9859]

XeSS is pretty damn good too

[@rhdbenchmarks]

DLSS is still ages ahead tbh. The only thing I like is that they decoupled the upscaler from FG, using DLSS + AMD's FG is golden.

[@Dorraj]

AMD Frame Gen with DLSS on 20 and 30 series cards is a huge middle finger to Nvidia, so I love them for that. But the upscaling part is still ages behind.

[@keyboard_g]

Sounds like a solid 3.0 -> 3.1 update.

[@jorge69696]

Considering it was compared to FSR 2.2, this is more like 2.3.

[@Chill_Mode_JD]

Oh no I think Alex needs a break He’s been FSRing way too much lately 😜

[@lulkLogan]

Would have been nice to see a comparison with Insomniac's home made ITGI upscaler

[@alanturing3256]

'FSR' is an acronym for 'Flickery Super Resolution'.

[@gametime4316]

when AMD will finally move to ML based upscaling FSR will be remembered as Failed Super Resolution :P

[@darudesandstorm7002]

flickering. shimmering. refund. 🤣

[@OmnianMIU]

LMAO 😂😂😂

[@saul8510]

​@@gametime4316Atleast it runs everywhere and gives great performance.

[@metroplex29]

Really love how fsr native aa looks on Forbbiden west and Ghost of Tsushima

[@LewisHamiltonMSPR]

FSR 3.1 looks more blurry to me compared to the older 2.2, like it has an extra smattering of FXAA applied to it.

[@RickySao]

I'm not going back to AMD GPUs anytime soon, but I like how they offer their upscaling technology to everybody

[@cromefire_]

Once their rumored ML based version is released (maybe with the next gen or so?) that might change at least a bit, I'd think they'd do it similarly to Intel, where their competition (and maybe even some of their older GPUs, especially RDNA2 and lower) get a lesser version.

[@no1DdC]

To be fair, so does evil Intel.

[@RickySao]

@@no1DdC Intel can't even manage to be evil anymore with their upcoming CPUs 😅😅😅

[@jeofthevirtuoussand]

if you realy did care for that sort of stuff , you would have got an amd gpu No need to justify your prushase of an nvidia or intel gpu, the quality of an upscaler is simply too important these days , especially at lower resolutions, meaning that can you can get more from the gpu a little longer ,😅

[@RickySao]

@@jeofthevirtuoussand I had a Radeon 5700 since 2019, dealt with many issues, lately upgraded to a RTX 3070 for dirts and the difference is night and day. I'm sure the newer AMD GPUs are way better than it was but, I can't with their drivers anymore...

[@donkeyy8331]

I've been wondering if studios should even bother to still support FSR instead of XeSS. I have an AMD GPU but whenever possible I will always default to XeSS, it still has some issues but overall image quality is way better than FSR. For older gpus they could maybe offer TAA or a simple Checkerboard rendering to increase resolution.

[@MR-vg7yn]

I'm honestly impressed that the "newcomer" XeSS holds up against DLSS so well and leaves FSR behind by a pretty big margin. How did Intel pull that one off?

[@gametime4316]

they use the generation of upscaling and same techniques... its only AMD that is stubborn and try to use non ML upscaling, and the longer they do the deeper the hole will be i.e more games will be released with the old FSR and wont have support for ML FSR when it will finally come out.

[@srn7254]

different technique coupled with an access to metric f***ton of computing power necessary to train deep learning models like that - same reason Microsoft's Auto SR is turning out quite good. a better question would be how Epic managed to vastly outdo FSR with its TSR though, given that it doesn't rely on AI at all.

[@Floodsye]

Every time I play a game where I don't have another option other than FSR...I usually just go with no upscaling and suck up the massive performance loss, lock to a solid 60 FPS, and enjoy a sharp image. In stills and slow motion, it's very obvious what the problems with FSR are, but in terms of real gameplay...I liken it to some of the Samsung G-Series monitors, they have this ridiculously pronounced anti-glare material that literally makes it look like there's film grain by default. That's what FSR is like in gameplay, like there's some kind of substance stuck inside my monitor, sloshing around as the picture moves, but it can't quite keep up.

[@Zastrutzki]

Thanks Alex, great work as usual!

[@Dionyzos]

I wonder if AMD would put in the effort to improve FSR if their current architecture would feature a tensor core equivalent. I honestly doubt it.

[@viet0ne]

No more than nVidia improving DLSS on older GPUs. The capability is there, nVidia chooses to only allow it on newer GPUs.

[@olnnn]

If only their most recent cards had it it might have been akin to XeSS where it had a fallback which worked on older cards but ran slower (compared to newer cards with HW accel and compared to current FSR)

[@slyseal2091]

@@viet0ne which will backfire, because that means most games in the next few years don't take advantage of this technology available only on a fraction of all cards. And eventually the 40xx's are gonna be priced like GTX cards, meaning they'll be faced with a wave of consumers that "just don't feel the need to upgrade to 50/60/70xx cards yet". All courtesy of the magical fps injectors, running alongside games that were made for a majority 10xx market. Suddenly everyone is in the fps bracket of playing then-contemporary games with hardware that Nvidia won't have received profits from in a long while.

[@DanielFerreira-ez8qd]

@@slyseal2091 ... that doesn't sound accurate at all. They still make "entry-level" cards, overpriced as they are. WHEN the 40 series cards actually get down to the price of GTX cards, that will have been several generations of hardware, which will most likely feature new functionalities that the 40 series cards just can't do.

[@Okusar]

​@viet0ne Nvidia allows DLSS on all cards that have the hardware to support it. Unless you're talking about DLSS frame generation specifically. Turing lacks the hardware Optical Flow Accelerator (nvOFA) necessary for DLSS frame gen; Ampere does have hardware OFA, but it's not fast enough to support real-time frame generation. Ada Lovelace improved the speed and efficiency of the nvOFA by around 4×, which is what makes DLSS frame generation viable on those cards. Nvidia could technically enable frame gen on 30-series, but it likely wouldn't offer any meaningful improvement to performance.

[@BCSpikeFM]

The fact that FSR 3.1 doesn't even try to AA the image before upscaling makes me wonder how all the upscalers compare in their native AA modes. I'd be very interested to see that type of comparison seeing as some folks out there have GPUs capable of maxing out settings at their monitor's resolution and/or refresh rate.

[@BagheeraRaceGamer]

I'm still happy with my 3060 Ti. But I'm still wanting some form of frame generation in my games, while upscaling with dlss

[@gametime4316]

i have RTX 4070TI and i don't use any form of FG its stupid, it's just better to run low and responsive 40FPS and not 60FPS that feel like 25FPS. (60FPS with FG wait for 2 30FPS frames to be rendered and have total latency worse than 20-25FPS. even with with 50FPS base (100FPS FG) it start to feel ok but u still end up with latency of 40 real FPS

[@light-gray]

Hey DF, Your description states that FSR 3.1 is a spatial upscaler but it isn't.

[@theotherguystv6393]

Great video Dic...Alex!

[@selohcin]

Good work, Alex. I was waiting for this video. I was expecting a significant improvement based on what AMD showed, but we only got a slight improvement. WHEN will AMD get their machine learning-based upscaling solution in their products??

[@wile123456]

Native FSR3.1 as anti aliasin g is really great. It's heavy, but millions times better than the bad TAA in Ghost of Thushima. Much more stability and sharpness. It's my preferred way to play, especially since in at 1080p and quality FSR is too low res for that resolution.

[@Schizm1]

I still think that FSR is freakin amazing considering it's avilable on all GPUs.

[@DeepteshLovesTECH]

So is XeSS DP4a

[@NicholasYTB]

No other cards want to use FSR super resolution shit, except FG

[@ParadoxalDream]

XeSS DP4a works better and also on all GPU.

[@paul1979uk2000]

@@NicholasYTB Pretty much all cards are using FSR and even console gamers are using it, heck, even Nvidia gamers on older gens are using it. What I do wonder is why XeSS isn't being used more, especially on consoles, I don't think I've seen it being used once yet on consoles. But in any case, considering that AMD and Intel gamers now have the option of FSR or XeSS, the selling point for DLSS is becoming much weaker, and basically, FSR or XeSS depending on game can deliver a good enough image and assuming the game supports, you can pick the best of the two whiles not being locked into Nvidia only cards with DLSS. So it doesn't really matter which is better, just as long as we have a few open options that are good enough, which we do with FSR and XeSS and for me at least, with XeSS 1.3, it's pretty much killed the selling point of DLSS in that you can buy any gpu and feel like you're not missing out.

[@soulshot96]

It's bad Temporal Upscaling with a little bit of mediocre AMD sharpening sprinkled on top (RCAS). It's not special at all, and it shows. It's nothing more than a fucking grift for good PR.

[@soulshinobi]

This was a great sales pitch for high end videos cards showing how much better super sampling it, I don't want to settle for less.

[@lordfunkatron9732]

I have been using FSR 2 in cyberpunk to scale to 4k and it only really seems to struggle with foliage compared to native TAA. If it continues to improve, FSR 3 is going to be a strong competitor to blurry TAA implementations as it resolves pretty sharp at 4k

[@12coco100]

FSR in Cyberpunk is good, you don't see the blocky pixels like the video shows in Rachet and Clank. Using a sharpening slider fixes the blurry look fsr can have. There's still changes cdpr can do outside of fsr to fix the pixel crawling in the game. There's a mip map mod thats supposed to clean up decals on the road and in the distance.

[@lordfunkatron9732]

@@12coco100 FSR main issue is it looks bad at lower resolutions, all modern upscalers at 4k are doing pretty well these days and vastly outperforming old blurry TAA. It's a shame it gets kinda a bad name because devs are pushing it too far

[@12coco100]

@@lordfunkatron9732 Exactly, I saw Vexs video and he was using 1440p performance mode for comparisons and didn't find much improvements over FSR 2.2. But when you watch other videos of 1440p quality or 4K testing, you see that FSR in a few instances gets close or matches DLSS. You could see in places FSR match can DLSS in this video too.

[@nanimonoda6897]

if intel ever gets to a point where they're dropping equivalent higher power GPUs as the Radeon cards then I think AMD might be in trouble

[@gametime4316]

both RDNA 4 and intel battlemage will peak at around RTX4080 performance and if intel have the better upscaler and good drivers AMD will be in serious problems, but the vast majority of people will just buy 5070 that will be around the same performance as well.

[@CaveyMoth]

Always great to see Ratchet & Clank in greater fidelity than ever.

[@CAPS_Paranormal]

Nice video Alex. I recently purchased a ROG Ally, and have noticed a big difference in these techniques versus my gaming PC. What's odd to me, though, is that on AMD hardware, Xess seems to give a little better image and even a tick or two up in framerate over FSR, which follows exactly what you said in this video. I don't notice it as much on my gaming rig because it has more brute power and doesn't need to rely on these supersampling techniques as much. I do wish ROG would have DLSS available, but I'm sure that wont happen lol.

[@Im_Behind_You]

THANK YOU FOR TESTING 1440p BALANCED I think most people will be using Quality mode anyway, but still. Not using 4K as a base is a HUGE WIN for common sense

[@c523jw7]

Surprised that.fsr actually is removing things like confetti and particles..literally stripping detail right out of the game. Didnt know it was this bad.

[@Dorraj]

Shoutout to the Glover music!

[@bananaboy482]

Digital foundry always has the best image quality analysis hands down. I never make my mind up on a new upscaler before I see Digital Foundry's video. Who would've thought that SSAO would appear under sampled in one version compared to the other? No other outlet is going to pick up on that.

[@ChannelSho]

Image stability is the biggest thing FSR needs to improve on. Flickering can get really distracting, especially if it's something high contrast like light reflections on a dark surface.

[@Ray-dl5mp]

Yuppers. If they fix that, I don’t think most gamers would care about other details. But that sticks out like a sore thumb.

[@KnightMD]

I'd like to know how real the extra frames in FG are in FSR 3.1 because some games lead to ghosting like Ghost of Tsushima, while others look smooth like Spider-Man Remastered.

[@maybebutwhatever]

It's been years already and FSR is still quite shitty :(

[@jayg339]

It was my big reason with going with a Nvidia gpu last year. DLSS has turned into such a great asset for making games look and run great(and up until recently they only had Frame Generation). I appreciate AMD has gone with this up scaling solution not reliant on motion vectors because it has allowed it to be used on all different kind of devices and older gpus ; helping extend the life of older gpus and making portable gaming on devices like the Steam Deck better - but I think they need to come up with a different solution to work alongside FSR like what Intel is doing with XeSS. A

[@leoni7649]

They insist on not using AI. There's no way they are going to beat an AI competitor

[@srn7254]

@@leoni7649 the video makes a point that even non-AI solutions like TSR completely trash FSR - there's probably no saving it at this point, and they'd be better off starting from scratch than trying to update this thing (which might actually be on the table now that they've decoupled FSR FG from the upscaling part).

[@spacechannelfiver]

@@maybebutwhatever It’s pretty okay when there’s more data to upscale from, or you are targeting a small screen like a deck. 1440p at medium is almost worse case. Regardless, it’s good to have options.

[@adi6293]

I tried it in Spiderman and it's pretty good, I used DLSS in the past and it wasn't always what it is now, people need to be realistic, nVidia doesn't have none ai upscaling that works on anything

[@soulsbourne]

7:36 ... The shiny things disappeared in DLSS 3.7 and FSR balanced but is present in XESS quality

[@NANOTECHYT]

If you go frame by frame, you can see the particle animation is different every time, the animation doesn't do the same thing every time you run this scene in the game. Look at the 4X Supersampled one for instance which is the crispest image, it's different to XeSS or FSR or DLSS ones because of the particle animation being unique every time. You can run this scene 10 times with XeSS and no settings changed and each pass would look slightly different to the last. What you can see is that yes FSR has less quality because certain elements of the animation are missing at points like the horizontal lines being wayyy thinner, but XeSS and DLSS are pretty comparable to each other and DLSS is the closest to 4x Supersampling. No technique is perfect out of the three, but DLSS is the closest and tends to hold the most detail.

[@coolcraig11]

Glad to see my favourite game Ratchet and Clank getting so much attention on the channel for pushing new technologies!

[@dustblowingman]

FSR is still 4 years behind DLSS it seems

[@OmnianMIU]

No. DLSS never has this trash pixelation, even on very first versions like 2.1

[@bobalazsgaming]

@@OmnianMIU first version was 2.1? What was 1.0 at all?

[@OmnianMIU]

@bobalazsgaming 1.0 was an early version that never came out in any game. Get some info on google, it's better then my english 😂👍🏼 type "DLSS 1.0"

[@nintendoconvert4045]

The AMD FSR 3 frame generation in Spider-Man and Ratchet & Clank is fantastic! It’s nice and smooth, unlike the very stuttery frame gen for me in Avatar FOP. Starfield frame gen is also buttery smooth.

[@Angel7black]

Its still pixelated and shimmery as hell though. It needs AI reconstruction. They’ve been stubborn as hell with it. It was meant to be a boxcheck and a way to get credit for giving upscaling to everybody while waiting for DLSS to prove to be a gimmick and die. That hasnt happened and Upscaling is becoming more and more important as these games launch unoptimized as hell and cards get older and stuck on lower resolutions. DLSS and XeSS are real selling points and AMD still refuses to acknowledge that flaw in their cards and just pretend they have something equivalent. KZbin fanboy comments can cope about how theyre basically equivalent now but every single normal person is just gonna try FSR for a few minutes and think “UGH” whenever they use it at 1440p or 1080p. Even at 4K its pretty mid

[@nintendoconvert4045]

@@Angel7black I’m not using the upscaler- just the frame generation. And with FSR 3.1, you can use other upscalers with frame gen if you wish.

[@xavdeman]

General conclusion: FSR 3.1 still makes objects/particles disappear. But it did decrease pixelation and aliasing flickering and instability comapred to FSR 2.2. XeSS (DP4a) remains really impressive, compared to even FSR version 3.1.

[@andyward8430]

I’m glad all of these upscaling and frame generation techniques are being implemented and improved over time, but I still can’t help but feel like at least with fsr it has been a step back in terms of image quality in an attempt to have higher granular detail. When I go back and play games like Skyrim or doom 2016 the overall image may not be quite as detailed as more recent games but image stability is practically perfect. No pixel crawl, no fizzling textures or shadows. It just seems like developers had image stability figured out before the introduction of image reconstruction, and I don’t find the increase in overall detail to be THAT significant most of the time. Personally I’d be okay with slightly less detailed visuals if it meant no distracting visual noise.

[@LutraLovegood]

Skyrim came out over a decade ago though

[@dethskullcrusher]

12:34 I think the FSR 2.2 Kick looks waay cooler, way more menacing, i mean the kick desintegrated the character to atoms, he kicked the pixels away from his face.

[@VincentVanBro]

Alex you are a gentleman and a scholar. A man’s man.

[@sev2300]

“It was a tick better than it was before” that’s exactly what was shown in the comparisons. The improvements, in terms of image quality, are minuscule. Glad Alex made this video. But I wish the video focused on frame generation instead.

[@florianwalch5639]

Looove the Glover soundtrack.

[@runner9528]

Why is no one talking about FSR 3.1 frame generation on its own (without upscaling) ? Feels like a big deal and no one cares. You can use FG with Native.

[@jlnprssnr]

Tried it in Spider Man and it's not very good in fast scenes. Running up a skyscraper, the whole area where spidey's legs are becomes a blurry mess with sampling artifacts. And I'm no AMD hater for sure

[@runner9528]

@@jlnprssnr with native resolution? that sucks to hear.

[@mohsenessa1195]

TSR so slept on. wish more games would use it

[@killermoon635]

It can only be used in Unreal Engine games

[@mohsenessa1195]

@@killermoon635 too bad even most unreal games dont include it maybe ureal should stop keeping taa the default or something cuz developers dont care to implement tsr. i recently played chained together with my friend and it was a bit laggy but the upscaler was so bad so no one used it even though the game is so gpu bound

[@TABSF1]

DLSS and it's not even a contest, AMD needs PSR tech for RDNA4

[@techsamurai11]

Yeah, they should get Sony to develop their upscalers and pay them since it's literally 3 trillion dollars in the balance. Any amount you pay even 10 billion, you make more money than any other investment. Sony would have been running AMD's video cards at 8k by now compared to 4k for Nvidia with same performance.

[@Rationalific]

Well said and well demonstrated!

[@leonthesleepy]

Im so excited for fsr 6.1

[@JerryFlowersIII]

Are they going to add upscaling to moving objects in that version?

[@AndyGilleand]

It seems that FSR has a big hurdle to compete with the other reconstruction techniques. By my eye, it appears that once an object is occluded, FSR no longer remembers where it was before it was occluded, whereas DLSS and XeSS do. However, it seems that FSR also does a poor job at reconstructing detail from motion vectors in general. While it's able to move previous pixels to their new location, the way it then samples those pixels together to generate the final resolve is quite poor, with the resulting image showing much more of the raw pixelation you would see before the final upscaling of those samples in the other techniques. Even if they just did the motion blur step AFTER the FSR step, it would look a million times better than it does here, but they need to have some form of recognizing the colors and borders of objects to reconstruct the samples together in a better way. Even without AI, you can produce a much better sampling than FSR is doing here.

[@Pan_Z]

Wish TSR was more common in UE games. In Tekken 8, it preserves image fidelity even better than DLSS. Digital Foundry did a comparison for it when Tekken 8 released.

[@johnsneed9985]

You guys should compare FSR native, DLAA, and native TAA.

[@TaskerTech]

Insane how the confetti dissapears

[@BlackPanthaa]

For portable PCs this is an incredible update. 1080p 60fps is doable and stable!!!!! what!!!

[@pool842]

I guess the positive thing about using an AMD card is that it will be fast even without 3.1. just turn that shit off and do normal 4K kids

[@bugbreadbuns]

All I'll say is FSR + frame gen is doing wonders for my 1660 super allowing me to play Ghost of Tsushima very comfortably

[@hirssi2321]

Just using XeSS on AMD seems to be the way until AMD gets better, I'm seeing very good results with XeSS 1.3.1 on Cyberpunk 2077 with AMD GPU and that gives me hope.

[@sho_0es_Raz]

I really do wish someone as thorough as @alex would do and an in depth of DLSS being used with FSR3 framegen and the image quality difference, how and when in the process the DLSS in used in relation to the interpolation. Also how that works with the Uniscaler mod from LukeFZ as in the config folder for that you can change the upscaler used for the fsr3 framgen algorythm. I'd love to know more about how this cross use of tech works. :)

[@rodrigojbc1]

I think TSR works that well without ML because it's deeply integrated into the engine. Maybe it is not possible to do the same thing in a generic way as FSR does.

[@Rift2123]

damn this game super sampled is so damn good looking

[@TheRepulsionGel]

Is SSAA actually an option in the game, or was VSR used?

[@DigitalFoundry]

I ran the game at the higher res and downsampled it in post

[@gametime4316]

​@@DigitalFoundry Alex I HATE U ! u reminded me how good SSAA looks about 15-20 years after i stopped using it back when i had the 7800GTX... so amazing how sharp and clean the image look, but it's just not useable those days when u start with 1440P or 4K resolution and when 165-240HZ monitors are so common, the image looks SO good but it's just painful to give up so much FPS. great video like always :)

[@no1DdC]

@@gametime4316 Use a very slow old monitor for a couple of days. Then going back to a modern gaming monitor will feel amazingly smooth, even if it's just running at less than 100 Hz. Or do what I did and only now upgrade from a 14 year old screen to a newer one (the 14 year old one was very high-end though, which is why it lasted for so long).

[@darudesandstorm7002]

@@no1DdC an 85hz crt still feels smoother than a 240hz oled (i have both) in terms of motion clarity. maybe the newer 480hz ones close the gap but i tried using one yet.

[@GrundleStiltSkin]

i find the FSR AA has bad smearing in HFW

[@Thezuule1]

Funny how I don’t hear nearly as much whining about “fake frames” now that AMD kids have them too.

[@jilinzhang5600]

Compute cost is directly connected to upscaling quality. Maybe they should use other data types if they still want to improve their upscaler.

[@jilinzhang5600]

But using other data types will do sacrifice compatbility. If your GPU is too old and don't support the instruction they use, then the new upscaler won't be available for you.

[@unbanmekoil]

Update: I was mistaken and thinking of XESS 1.3 which uses different internal resolutions for performance, balanced, etc. rendering modes and not FSR3 FSR3 uses a lower base resolution versus FSR2, isn’t that right? That’s how they claim a performance boost. Was this taken into consideration? Seems like using the exact same base resolution is something you wanna get right. (FSR 3 Balanced ≈ FSR 2 Performance)

[@waltuhputurdaway]

yeah this didnt happen, internal res is still the same.

[@unbanmekoil]

@@waltuhputurdaway oh really? Am I crazy or was this something AMD planned on doing?

[@waltuhputurdaway]

@@unbanmekoil just crazy, only company to change internal res for upscaler so far is Intel's XeSS

[@unbanmekoil]

@@waltuhputurdaway damn I’m coockoo and I know it.

[@omidmiresmaeili]

Very nice comparisons. I wonder how TAA compares with FSR. Is it more stable or causes even more flickering issues

[@MLWJ1993]

Likely more ghosty since TAA strives to use as little resources as possible as a post process AA. However with increased compute resources thrown at it EPICs TSR is what you'd end up with.

[@BeersYourFriend]

This was a great video explaining the new FSR 3.1 tech, and I think Alex nailed it. The confetti in the side-by-side shots was clearly the star of the show here, because FSR v3.1 just looked terrible when compared to Nvidia's DLSS and XeSS. The confetti has absolutely no shape to them and just looks like colored particles in the wind. Also the sign above the robots head was the icing on the cake. I'm not sure how much further AMD can enhance their FSR technique. Sure, it's a great piece of tech that has its place, but we have seen time-and-time again that AMD is struggling. Whenever we see a new FSR update, it is never a substantial update that knocks our socks off. So, I doubt that this AMD FSR reconstruction system will ever succeed. AMD should try something brand new than wasting their time tweaking it. Windows Auto SR looks to be doing a much better job with it's new upscaling compared to FSR, and Microsoft just launched it. We will have to wait and see what AMD decides to do. AMD can do better, they know they can do better, so it's time for them to do better. I am not completely trying to crap on AMD, since I think competition is healthy. Most gamers look at something and may call it trash, but that doesn't mean gamers want to see a company fail. I would like to purchase an AMD graphics card, since they are much more affordable over Nvidia's GPUs, but I just can't make the switch until I see AMD take image quality upscaling much more seriously. Again, excellent video as always Digital Foundry. This tech is so fascinating to me.

[@youtubevanced4900]

I just can’t stand the shimmering and flickering. I haven’t tried FSR but it’s the same with DLSS. I’d rather just have a lower frame rate. Although looking at your comparisons in this video, DLSS looks allot better than when I tried it in Cyberpunk. It was really bad.

[@tomkirbygreen]

Lovely treatment Alex, insightful with some gentle humour. Hope you find a good use for your errant drive…

[@draco10111b]

I purpose grading the different upscaling techniques using a scale that goes from upscaled original TAA to supersampling with whatever range you want to pick. Just saying one is better than another is loosing how close or far these technologies actually are to one another.

[@aeidengtfo6758]

Who uses balanced mode?

[@hastesoldat]

I do sometimes for 1440p on my 4070s. I've been using many different scaling options depending on the situation. (from performance up to DLAA). Most of the time, I use performance though.

[@NANOTECHYT]

He's using balanced mode to give AMD the best shot at having a decent pixel count to work with, whilst also showing the shortfalls of FSR as well at 1440p. If you use FSR at 4K Quality the artifacting is not as severe, so it's not really a good test to show any 3.1 improvements. But yes, it's not realistic to use balanced really at 1440p, I personally wouldn't use FSR below Quality mode at any resolution, image quality is just so important to me, but so is fluidity and moving down to quality mode gives a decent frame rate bump whilst keeping quality close to native.

[@rollerr]

Digital Foundry, because they want FSR to look as crappy as possible lol

[@NANOTECHYT]

@@rollerr DLSS: Looks good in balanced mode XeSS: Looks decent in balanced mode FSR: Looks bad in balanced mode. Ah yes, it's Digital Foundry that's the problem, not FSR!

[@mp44christos]

fsr3.1 now you can use xess and fsrfg thats all there is to know

[@SaltMakerE]

Former 7900XTX owner here. Owned the card for over a year and finally had to let it go last month. Why? The card itself was fantastic, but I severely underestimated the importance of AI upscaling in future games, and the reality is FSR has been a massive disappointment. The last straw for me was owning a $1000+ GPU and being forced to use the competitor's upscaling technology (Xess) in games because it is superior.

[@jayg339]

That was my big deciding factor between choosing a 7900xt of a 4070ti. I know AMD makes great gpus, but spatial upscaling has become a pretty important part of getting the best out of games. XeSS is getting better and Sony is working on their own upscaling solution for the PS5(which kind of tells you their lack of confidence in AMD’s current ability to advance FSR). FSR Frame Gen has turned out to be solid, and FSR 3.1 has improved, but it’s still pretty far behind the competition. And that’s not even getting into things like power efficiency, Ray reconstruction, better Ray Tracing performance, etc. Hopefully AMD is cooking up some good stuff for the next couple years because I would hate to see Nvidia just walk away with the market.

[@SterkeYerke5555]

As a 6900XT owner, I sort of agree. I had a choice between either this or the 3080 10GB. Since I got a 4K monitor at the same time, 10GB of VRAM didn't seem like a good idea to me. I still think I made the right choice based on that (and just better rasterization performance from the 6900XT in general), but high fidelity upscaling is very important if you're trying to game in 4K and FSR doesn't do it justice. Sometimes I'm better off upscaling native 1440P to 4K via RSR instead.

[@no1DdC]

Yup. AMD is doing fine in lower price brackets, on consoles and mobile hardware (Steam Deck), but if you want all of the bells and whistles, better ray-tracing performance and better image quality (as well as the ability to use the card for things other than gaming), Nvidia is currently far ahead, as much as this pains me to say, because I want healthy competition and one company being effectively without any is not good for customers. That said, AMD is only a good deal for cheaper cards if you ignore the used market. I bought a used RTX 2080 last year, because I wanted DLSS and the ability to use the card for machine learning, offline-rendering and scientific applications. Both in terms of gaming and non-gaming capabilities, there was no used nor new AMD card that could compete with it for around €200. I bought this card for 1600p/60, but having recently switched to a 1440p/180 monitor, it's doing well at higher frame rates as well. One aspect I did notice however during monitor shopping is just how many FreeSync compared to explicitly G-Sync compatible monitors there are (even though many FreeSync displays work with G-Sync). AMD did well here with their more open standard.

[@jayg339]

@@SterkeYerke5555 The 6900xt is a really great card. Perhaps you could get away with using AMD Frame Gen with traditional AA now. I feel like that would probably produce a better image with performance improvements without the downfalls of FSR. Although it depends on the game. FSR struggles a bit more when there is a lot of constant moving on screen. If the game is more static then FSR tends to handle the upscaling fairly well when upscaled from a reasonable resolution.

[@SterkeYerke5555]

@@jayg339 I haven't got any game in which I could try that yet, but I think the 6900 possibly isn't quite powerful enough for it in modern games. I typically get drops into the 40s at native 4K, which isn't terrible, but it might introduce a bit too much input lag when using FG. I'll be sure to try it out though!

[@jamescole3143]

Thank you DF!

[@OrnelloLiborio]

14:00 FSR 3.3 ???

[@abz7800]

There's basically no visible confetti in fsr it looks so bad comapre to ssao

[@Chas3265]

Love the Halo music

[@jarrodkober]

9:35 FSR 3.1 also loses the transparency of the sign above the character. Taking on an opaque look, where the lines than run through the sign are blown out and it just takes on a solid, brighter color. Its weird, almost looks like extra gamma applied since you can't see the detail, or that cool strobing CRT look. Totally lost in the sauce.

[@kelownatechkid]

Why can't alex get an audio engineer to at least look at his recording setup 😭 it's so harsh and sounds compressed to hell, like a De-esser gone horribly wrong. It's even crackling at points like wtf?

[@Alovon]

Will we get a follow up comparing FSR3.1 FG to DLSS FG in these games? Primarily as I'm curious to see if the difference in cost of using DLSS FG vs FSR FG manifests here as it has been recorded in more titles lately and i have a theory it may be due to OFA Latency mandating a minimum % frametime cost to the internal framerate that then gets multiplied

[@Alovon]

The key thing that makes me think this is how the frametime cost has a recorded lowest value, and how that is consistent on the 4090, but not the 4080 (the 4080 sometimes having the same cost in Cyberpunk PT, but not Alan Wake 2 for example)

[@Benefits]

Hot take: Future game consoles should use Nvidia hardware and take full advantage of DLSS and Frame Generation tech to make console gaming a better experience. FSR makes games look horrible in motion.

[@gothpunkboy89]

Nvidia already messed over Sony and Microsoft for theit consoles. I doubt they are willing yo reach out again. Even more so because of the prices of their hardware.

[@slyseal2091]

The only reason consoles aren't spoken of in past tense is because they're better value gaming platforms than a computer. This wil make them more expensive and effectively tie them to Nvidias tech-monopoly. The same Nvidia that saw the AI boom coming and jacked up the price of the 40xx's. The same Nvidia that's staring down the barrel of an inevitable burst of the AI bubble, who can surely think of a few ways to "use" the console markets dependency of them. I wouldn't count on standardised DLSS 'till the Nvidia v. DoJ antitrust case of 2055 is concluded.

[@srn7254]

with how little they're focused on consumer-grade hardware these days, they'd probably charge such a premium that a) neither Sony nor Microsoft would ever accept since their entire business model is built on selling games as opposed to consoles themselves, and b) even if they somehow accepted that, an average consumer would be better off just buying PC instead given that exclusives are rapidly dying and there'd be little benefit to owing one in the first place without the massive budget difference to take into account.