Image Quality Enhanced: DLSS 3.7 vs XeSS 1.3 vs FSR 2 - ML Upscaling Just Got Better
With the arrival of DLSS 3.7 and XeSS 1.3, machine learning-based upscaling has improved once again, with the gulf vs FSR 2 (aka FSR 3 spatial upscaling) widening still further. Alex takes a look at what XeSS 1.3 brings to the table, along with Intel's revamped preset naming, while examining the improvements that DLSS 3.7's new 'E' option offer vs existing offerings. We'll be looking at FSR 3.1 as and when the new update lands.
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00:00:00 Introduction
00:00:41 Intel XeSS 1.3 Analysis
00:12:20 Nvidia DLSS 3.7 Analysis
00:15:40 FSR2 vs XeSS 1.3 vs DLSS 3.7
00:18:47 Conclusion
NV Profile Inspector:
github.com/Orbmu2k/nvidiaProf...
XML Files for NV Profile Inspector:
www.nexusmods.com/site/mods/7...
Pretty impressed with XeSS. It has come along way in a short amount of time. Hope FSR 3.1 is good as well.
Nah. ATI... *cough cough*... ah I mean AMD are going to make it "kinda good but not really" as always. It's sadly an inherent part of their company DNA. Also: It's David vs Goliath. Intel has 125.000 employees. Thats more than DOUBLE than Nvidia and AMD _COMBINED._ In true AMD fassion, they are 3rd place now in terms of quality. I really wish these guys could compete, but I bet Intel will overtake them in the GPU business one day.
It'll be "good enough" but still behind DLSS and XeSS. It's what happens when you want to save money on silicon and R&D by not adding discrete AI/Tensor cores and instead decide to make FSR a simpler temporal upscale filter that runs on everything for the sake of compatibility and higher chance of game developers adopting it Maybe RDNA4 will change it if AMD add an NPU like in Ryzen 8000 and create a trained AI model for upscaling
@@UnluckyDomino Well, good enough is good enough. DF have to use zoom (like in this video) and slow motion to show the differences. But I never use 400% zoom and slow motion in games. Do you?
it won't surpass xess, let alone dlss simply because it's not using ML
@@TheNerd im all on board hating on companies but AMD changed the game with cpu's, Intel cannot keep up atm. i remember amd being absolute trash with their FX series and was always skeptical like you about buying anything AMD. fast forward to 2020-24, AMD is more reliable in the CPU market than what you make it out to be. GPU's are also not trailing too far behind, you have to remember how trash AMD was, just like intel are right now.
FSR 3.1 is way overdue, and DLSS just keeps getting better which is great to see.
Except dlss doesn't keep getting better it gets better with each generation so long as you keep buying every generation
eh, most gamers wont really care
@@Decenium Why not?
In rt,upscalling, productivity AMD is 2 gen behind Nvidia 1 gen behind intel Amd is NOW officially 3rd player Even though i m an Amd fanboy Amd just deserves it
@@mrshinobigaming8447amd is actually pretty decent for video editing workloads. 3D software like blender needs a big upgrade tho. It's kinda a joke that it's taking AMD forever to finally add AI to upscaling.
Amd never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity😂
Man I wish they'd give their GPUs the same love they give for their CPU division.
yeah that is wild...Intel's upscaling tech is now better than AMD's FSR🤯
Never gets old😆
4th in a 3 horse race
Don't worry, they're gonna finally catch up in a few months.
One of the things I love about DLSS is being able to swap in new DLLs, tweak the presets, and use tweaks to switch from DLSS to DLAA for games that don't need more FPS.
How do you do that exactly?
@@JPOGame you use DLSSTweaks
@@JPOGame Like it was literally said?. Download + unzip + copy + paste (/ overwrite the old Dll in the game directory).
@@JPOGame DLSS swapper and DLSS tweaks are two programs you can use to do that.
... as well you can with XESS
Its crazy how fast intel is catching up on the software side. Hopefully their hardware will start matching that.
They're still a half decade behind on hardware. That gap doesn't just close magically
@@narniaphuket _Only_ a decade behind. It's also more like 5 years. And they don't need to make anything that competes with the 4090. Not even a 4070. If their value proposition is good enough, and they can make up the difference with software, I will be happy. And guess what, that's what they're doing currently.
@@narniaphuket Its quite the opposite, the hardware itself is really good and future proof but poorly exploited by software/drivers They have just decided not to scale up to a bigger GPU to begin with and try to target as many consumers as possible.
They're the ones offering 256 bit 16 gigs of vram and even fast ram on their lower end models while AMD and nvidia (especially nvidia) struggle to even give us working vram amounts and speeds at the same prices (and even much more expensive). So if anything they're already evolving in some regards.
Maybe noy yhe 4090 but the 4070? THEY NEED TO REACH THAT AT LEAST, @@hundvd_7
I've been experimenting with XeSS 1.3 and it's very close to DLSS now, will be a huge win for people with older GPUs along with FSR 3.1 frame generation
@@BryAlrighty From the reviews, newer GPUs with XeSS look very close to DLSS, with intel it's on pair with DLSS
@@markojovanovic6928 XeSS with dp4a looks better than FSR for sure. But still miles away from DLSS. Too much "fizzle"
@@BryAlrightyIn some games I’d say XeSS looks better
@iitzfizz but runs way slower than dlss on amd cards.
frame gen is only good for games that already run at 60 fps to reach 90+ at 120hz displays. if you can't reach 60 already then don't bother with it.
FSR 3.1 (or any improvement) rollout has been moving at a snails pace, AMD needs to get their stuff together
Not gonna happen soon as their software team is small compared to Nvidia's.
Weird phrasing since FSR 3.1 hasn't occurred at ANY pace because it hasn't started. They said it's coming in Q2, but they didn't say April.
They are slow af, i gave them a chance but the next upgrade i will return to nvidia.
@@user-mw4wq3ci3d I am also leaning towards Nvidia for the next one but their price levels are insane.
AMD desperately needs FSR3.1 soon and to be good! As an AMD user I basically avoid FSR like the plague (in most cases), because of its artifacts, while I was pretty happy with dlss2.0 when I had a 3060ti and with xess when I had an A750
The Clouds in Avatar are not a problem with DLSS itself, but with the Implementation. PureDark's DLSS 3 mod for Avatar fixes that issue completely. If I remember correctly, the developers have not passed the depth buffer correctly to DLSS and that was a relatively easy fix from PureDark's side.
Last time I tried PureDark DLSS 3 mod (beta 3 hotfix 3), it hasn't been fixing cloud jitters in Avatar. Did the new version fix that?
@@333hronos I believe it was already included in Beta version 01. You have to check the 'Fix DLSS Depth' option, If I remember correctly, but has been a while, maybe I'm wrong about that option being responsible for the cloud fix. They were definitely not jittering for me with his mod, that I'm 100% certain of.
@@cpt.tombstone No, "Depth fix" option didn't help me. Moreover, it gives me strange oreols on distant leaves and trees if there is a waterfall with steam effects behind it, so I decided to keep it off. Do you know the latest version number of the Avatar mod?
@@333hronos beta 04, I believe
@@cpt.tombstone thank you, will try it later
As a PC user I'm happy all fronts of upscalling are getting better and excited to see FSR 3.1 even if I'm mostly a DLSS user, and as an console user I'm praying that FSR 3.1 drops soon and that studios update their FSR2 games to FSR3 please (maybe PSSR and the probable Sony upscalling API helps with this?).
Can't wait to see what PSSR is capable of
Probably better than FSR but slightly worse than XeSS. Which is reasonable enough imo
Pre-Startup Safety Review?
Thank you so much for this comparison, a lot of info to digest... I had no idea we can use different models with DLSS with the same .dll.
This is my favorite category of DF videos, excellent work as always Alex
Just as a passing thought: If there were a patreon option to fund more technical deep dive videos like this, similar to how there is DF retro funding, that would tip me into monthly supporter status 😉
@@cheese_crab Same here! I mostly enjoy these types of videos from DF! :)
@@cheese_crab The issue is likely time than money considering how small the team is.
Next on board, FSR 3.1 and PRSS. Amazing work Alex!!!
Please do more of these upscaling comparisons with different versions
Thank you for demonstrating how to tweak the preset letter
XeSS has really come a long way quickly. I'd now take even the DP4a gladly. Sad that we didn't see framerate comparisons in the videos!
The reason you pay additional when buying RTX Cards is the Tensor Cores and it's worth it.
I'd love for more of a focus on the anti aliasing modes, and with the popularity of resolution sliders that go above 100%, supersampling modes would be awesome too. This push for upscalers has finally brought improvements to terrible TAA technology. It's just a shame it's rarely given a high quality input.
Incredible amount of work in this video. Excellent 👌
Add in native resolution during comparison from time to time please. Thanks for this great video
It's really impressive how XeSS has improved in a very short time.
AMD’s stubbornness in dedicating silicon to ML and RT is going to cost them in the long run.
As shown by XeSS, it is not necessary to have dedicated ML for upscaling. As far as RT, they have dedicated silicon.
@@systemx6603It's not necessary, but DLSS is still better than all of them, and that matters, as it's by far the most widely available upscaling solution. The biggest issue for AMD right now is that they have a worse equivalent for every technology provided by Intel or Nvidia. The best part of it is the hardware agnostic properties of FSR, but that's it. Everything else is worse.
@systemx6603 the RT silicon of RDNA3 does not do the same thing as Intel and Nvidia's. It does not perform BVH transversal in hardware, which is the most compute-intenseive component of RT. That is instead handled in software executed by the TMUs.
@@DigitalJedi and yet i still get 60 fps with RT turned on (7700xt) so who cares?
@@thefilmdirector1but not in 4k
Thank you DF!
Interesting work. Great video.
Intel's doing amazing work with their software. Congrats to their team.
Thanks! :)
Hey, can you make a video about lossless scaling ? Both upscaling and frame gen component.
Great comparison and insight, I'll try the upgraded Xess in HFW soon. If you are looking for tricky scenes to compare, I noticed in HFW, the Vantage Point holograms loose a lot of details that visualized the difference in quality well.
Great job! Thanks for the in depth explanation. Have you tested this with Laptop GPUs?
Crazy how amd fanbois will defend FSR to their graves when it really is sooooo bad compared to DLSS and Xess
I had an amd vega 64 gpu which I recently changed to 4060 n I can easily say I loved how amd fsr looked n amd image shapening is so good that I’m considering selling my rtx card I recently played tlou 1 in pc n I can’t tell you how good it looked in my vega n I even got more fps with fsr mod n it looked way better than dlss n I’m playing red dead 2 on rtx 4060 but it doesn’t look so good on this card n I am very very particular about how my games look n run I take weeks to fiddle n get the best looks for any games n even in forbidden west my vega outperformed 4060 n looked better n more sharper n cleaner idk how
N I’m not any fanboy I used both n I think Radeon image sharpening is so good it alone worth buying amd gpu as barely there are few games with ray tracing anyways
@@ttghhgg1918 Press Alt+F3 to open the Freestyle filters overlay, enable Sharpen or Sharpen+
AMD fanbois - "bUt FsR is FrEe aNd oPeN sOuRcE !!1!11!1" firstly, stfu i know you dont know how to code or read code even, so FSR's open-source code wont be even useful you unless you are some kind of developer secondly, FSR is free, but so is XeSS, and from what it seems, it seems to beat FSR in quality at similar FPS
I'm excited for PSSR comparisons for when PS5 Pro comes out.
I will never get tired of Alex's sign-off...
What a proper video! Quality in all aspects
I really appreciate the XeSS DP4a vs XMX path comparison I feel like there aren't any other videos comparing them
yep, despite what stubborn mules of hardware reviewers like Hardware Unboxed think; ARC is actually selling, a LOT. a750s have been chronically sold out in my country since forever, despite computer stores like PLE ordering as many from suppliers as they can, and A770 availability is spotty too. Nvidia and AMD left a massive gap in the market getting greedy after the 3rd crypto run, ARC is the only good budget option in most places unless you buy used. Showing XMX mode in XeSS should be done.
Really interested how PSSR compares to all 3 of them. It's an exciting time in gaming graphics these days!
whats exciting about upscaling and fake frames exactly?
It will be interesting if it will retroactively improve older games or only be utilised in exclusives or future titles. It would be very strange if it performed better than DLSS and be exclusive to the PS tech. I dont expect much this generation. Doubt it will perform as good as DLSS without some years to improve. Maybe in time for the PS6 but not the PS5 Pro. Like to be wrong tho.
I could swear that Sony's algorithm is none other than fsr3 since it runs on AMD GPUs
PSSR is probably based on FSR4, since that's coming out with RDNA4 and is ML based.
@@thefilmdirector1 Being able to have a card punch above its weight of course. Frame gen I'm less excited about, but upscaling has done wonders for game performance on mid-range hardware. I would argue graphics cards prices are pretty outrageous, but if my $320 6700xt can play games at acceptable image quality on a 4k TV using FSR/XeSS that's pretty awesome and is a great option to have rather than just having to brute force with a more expensive card. Options are good, can still run at native resolution if you want.
OMG ALEEEX!!! IT'S MY FAVOURITE SONGS FROM HALO ON THE BACKGROUND!! LEGENDARY VIDEO!!!
I have a a770 in my second pc and so far it’s been a great card. Minus couple drivers issues like 8 months ago the drivers been fine since and has played every game fine that I have tried
Damn first five min? Hell yeah
FSR is like someone coming to your house and tweaking the settings on your TV and saying it's 8k.
Just in your house, not mine!
Ah great video Alex, but to soon, it should be compared when FSR 3.1 arrives
wondering just how DLSS Q compares to all of those modes present in the video. Does it help eliminating those moire artefacts compared to DLSS B?
Hi Alex, great video!. Do you think developers should skip FSR2 entirely and rely on XeSS DP4a for compatibility? Does XeSS DP4a work on consoles?
I think developers should still have FSR 2 there for user choice and for lower end devices of course. XeSS DP4a could work on consoles like XSS and XSX (but not on PS5, performantly as we see with XeSS performance on the RX 5000 series). But there is no easily available code for developers to port it to console atm. Intel has not really opened it up for that. -Alex
I agree. Fabio from Ancient Gameplays has shown FPS losses using XeSS Quality on AMD cards in particular games.
@@DigitalFoundrythe SDK is available on Github. Would it really be any more difficult to implement XeSS into a console game than it is to put it in a PC game? I wouldn't think it would be any harder, only that FSR and first party upscalers are easier to put in.
@@DigitalFoundry A real shame. It would've been a gamechanger on console, almost removing the need for PSSR. I guess we'll have to wait & see what happens with FSR 3.1 and how TSR is coming along.
@@ryanspencer6778 That's just the SDK for adding it to a windows executable. not the source code for XeSS itself. Also as noted, FSR and XeSS does not have the same performance impact on non-intel hardware, something that wasn't really covered in the video, it will only be beneficial if it can give better quality at equal processing cost
Huh, I thought modded implementations of XeSS 3 kept the same resolution tables as XeSS 1.2, but that's interesting to see that's not the case (as some other channels may have reported)! I have been using it in a few games (mostly Cyberpunk), but those also have dynamic resolution scaling options that I've been using as well so I'm guessing that hasn't been a factor to me as I'm just hitting that 60fps target. I love, love LOVE that XeSS has the DPA4 path and it's now superior to FSR2.2. It's great to see even my 6700xt get access to machine learning upscaling in some games, hopefully more titles will have it in the future. Really wish it would be added to Alan Wake 2 for example (or at least FSR3.1 when that comes out). Hopefully in the future more games will also have just a resolution slider as well. Was pretty nice in Tekken 8 to just be able to slider TSR from 50-100, although I wouldn't mind going as low as 720p on a 4k monitor just for giggles. It usually looks horrendous with FSR2, but more options are always better.
Try out the ultra performance mode in XeSS if you want to see what extreme resolution scaling looks like. It's a 3x upscale, so 33% internal resolution. It takes 3840x2160 down to 1280x720.
@@DigitalJedi Oh I'll certainly be giving it a go once games implement XeSS 1.3 fully. It'll be super interesting to see how it compares to FSR2 Ultra Performance. Still hoping for a resolution slider that goes all the way from 720p to native 4k though, I think a few games have the sliders, but I don't think they go quite that low. Realistically the thing I've always wanted was to have 1440p "quality" upscaling resolutions boosted to 4K output and see how that looks. I'm quite happy that XeSS now has that option with their new performance mode. I've always wondered how it would look, as sometimes I just want a touch more performance at 4k and maybe, just maybe that would be satisfactory rather than going all the way down to 720p. Super happy they added the option.
Great work!
I'm most curious about improvements at the extremes--Ultra Performance modes. That's where there's the most room for improvement.
Love the Halo music at the beginning
Plays throughout
That Halo soundtrack really is a vibe.
Omg agree, this soundtrack somehow fits perfectly to a tech analysis
Glad to see I wasn't the first to notice/point that out. When those first few notes of the bass line hit I was like, "Oh hello old friend!" 😄
the original XeSS release had 5 settings but just two models. It would use bilinear upscaling (and downscaling) to the actual model input and then get the target resolution output. Intel hasn't really been transparent with what is really happening. And they never made it open source as promised. So I started to do some research myself. And the biggest indicator for file size. This lead me to guess that yes, for 1.3 it's more than two models. The sharpness debate is a difficult one. The XeSS SDK allows 3 sliders(wiggle distance, sharpness, filter) for the game developer to tune and apply to the named profiles (would be great if we get that as a user perhaps). You can read about it in the PDF document in the repository or even download and try the demo project. It has all the sliders available to you. And the swapping dll problem just keeps the previous settings. So it might not be tuned for the changed base resolution. So I believe this requires a follow-up video with an official 1.3 update/title... Or comparisons in the demo app. The trails in the clouds seems like a bug worth reporting to me. Clouds are likely to be their own render pass, and particles too. Since clouds use a buffer of the previous timestep, it seems to be affected be overwritten(it loses it's timestep, and therefore the hiszory isn't spatially consistent). clouds are expensive if ray marched, and therefore might be run at a buffer with reduced resolution. It could be an issue where that reduced resolution is wrongly calculated. would be interested to go frame by frame through the pipeline and see where data is ruined. It would have been great to get a native res/ground truth with MSAA(or similar) comparison for at least a few examples. Perhaps even give a no AA base resolution example, to show what the model input is and what they have to work with (minus wiggle and vectors). That is additional capturing, but it's easier than swapping dlls or cards. ExtraSS has a video in their supplemental materials from the siggraph talk. and that will be exciting. As it does resolution and temporal extrapolation with guidance (=meaning geometry pass without shaders). So it might be a generation a head. Can't wait for that video.
Another excellent comparison! What games will natively support DLSS 3.7?
Xess is getting there. Dlss should improve fast if it wants to remain the best upscaling method
Xess can be as good as it wants to be, nobody buys Intel gaming GPUs
@@katzenjunge5869 For now
@@katzenjunge5869 Maybe. But I just swapped XeSS 1.3 into cyberpunk and... XeSS Quality means Raytracing Psycho at 1440p60+ on my RX 7900 XTX. So... I'm just thankfull for the competition.
nobody? Lots of people are. I'd take one over an Nvidia GPU at this point, just because of how overpriced team Green is. The issue with them is Nvidia is their going into an AI company, not a gaming company like they used to.
It's a niche problem, but for me as a 3080 12GB owner, the best part about DLSS is DLAA and it's sadly not available most of the time.
Use DLSS Tweaks to force DLAA on every game that has DLSS.
Use DLSSTweaks to manually add it in. That's what I've been doing for games that don't have in-game support for DLAA and so far it's been working like a charm. You can also override the DLSS preset values to whatever you want.
Just use DLSS Tweaks u can force DLAA
you can force dlaa in any game that supports dlss even if it doesn't support dlaa officially, just search dlaa in any game on youtube and click the first one
I'm using dlss 3.7 at under 1080p base res and it still looks amazing on my 4K TV.. it's really ridiculous. It still doesn't replace true performance and never will, or excuse bad optimization, but it's really ludicrous how well it works.
Just tried DLSS 3.7 (E) in Diablo4 works wonders with new raytracing features and framegen works properly now which was a surprise.
XESS 1.3 is amazing and lifted HFW to new hights on my aging GTX 1660 Ti MaxQ, when the replacement DLL became available. I am still immensely impressed though about what FSR 2.2 is managing in ultra performance (upscaling 360p to 1080p) WITHOUT ANY AI whatsoever. Sure it looks pretty unstable in motion but when coming to rest it produces a stable image, which looks like native 1080p (based on 360p!) with no direct comparison ... without AI! At launch it was the best option for me to play the game as XESS' 1.2 PERFORMANCE was not only similarly unstable, but also performed a lot worse AND looked much more blurry on top of that than FSR 2.2 ULTRA PERFORMANCE ... again: without AI! 🤯 That seemed extremely impressive to me and deserves a mention IMO 😊
I totally agree that FSR is impressive for what it is. It's essentially a standard image upscaling and sharpening algorithm. I must admit though, both XeSS on the same hardware makes it look outdated sometimes. Intel stepped up to the GPU game as a real competitor with hardware RT and proved you can make good upscaling run on everything.
@@DigitalJedi I as well totally agree with you 😊👌
Xess just doesnt run as good as fsr in cards that's old.
DLSS, DLAA, frame gen, RT. Yes Nvidia GPUs are pretty expensive but these features unfortunately will keep me in their eco systems
Yup, they’ve combined world class features along with their GPUs. And did so way ahead of the curve.
@@RicochetForce it still depends what you're loking for tho. for 90% of people out there AMD is still the superior choice even tho no one is buying it for some reason. Most people play 1080p/1440p no RT and those features are kinda useless in those scenarios. And you're paying 20/30% less for the same performance picking AMD. Nvidia only really starts to make sense at $600+
@@rainar2742 I've bought a RX 7900 XTX for €900 because I wanted enough Raster for Asseto Corsa at 4K 100+ fps. 4080 Super was €1200 at the time. Now that XeSS 1.3 dropped I'm replaying Cyberpunk with Raytracing Psycho at 1440p60 at XeSS Quality. FSR and XeSS 1.2 are absolutely unusable, so I was surprised just How good 1.3 works, It just turned my XTX into a perfectly capable raytracing card.
Sehr gut! Creo que para analizar a nivel de píxeles hubiera sido mejor comparar en 1080p
Spanish and german wtf
why is bro speaking espanol and deutsch in the same sentence 😭
I'm glad you're doing okay Alex! I was afraid you were hospitalized since Stellar Blade is almost out!
Are You going to check out Lossless Scaling frame generation?
Loss Less is compared to old FSR1, so it’s pretty much out of the game by now.
@@GoMArkkrAM hes talking about frame gen part of lossless scaling, dubbed lsfg. i've been using it for 60 fps locked games and it works really well, especially considering that im still using a 1070
@@Dragoonoar Ow yes mate, I was using it with a Rx5700 and served pretty well, recently got a rx 7600 and moved to natively option (AFMF) and it is far superior, since then, uninstalled the lossless app.
I never knew DLSS had different presets
Love your videos!
The jittering is gone in the 1.3 blur, but take a look the tree edge and tell me that isn't much worse. It sharpened the blur and now the image has sharp pixel stairs instead of the smooth gradient blur.
I have to give HUGE props to Intel for not only pretty much surpassing AMD with their XeSS, but by getting closer to DLSS than anyone else ever has. That's insanely impressive considering that XeSS like under 2 years old. That amount of improvement in that amount of time is honestly kind of baffling to me.
FSR is so bad that it's not a huge achievement to do better, honestly. It's not even ML based :/
Man, this open source upscaler from AMD sure is being useful in allowing us to update to improved versions of FSR as they come out. It helps it stand out very clearly against the closed source upscalers from Intel and Nvidia which prevent us from doing such things. Wait... it's the other way around? But... but everyone told me that open source was better... Well at least AMD is consistently updating their upscaler to keep it competitive against other upsca- wait, they're not doing that either? Oh come on!
AMD 3.1 is coming pretty soon, which improves the Upscaling. Alex mentioned, it in the video. Nice try... 🙄
@@rob4222 lol you again rob, yeah sure keep trying to defend AMD pal trash
@@Eleganttf2 I didn't defend anything. I only wrote that 3.1 will improve image quality
Man I'm glad I don't care this much about graphics but am thankful for the analysis
13:56 How are you gettting these #1 and #2 categories? I don't have them on the same version of Nvidia Profile Inspector
It should just be there if you're using the newest drivers
@@Cheynanigans__ false. You need an xml file which is linked in the description of the video.
@@SimplexPL You're right! My mistake, I forgot I'd put that extra .xml file in there long ago. Sorry!
Cool how amd invented per object motion fizzle
Wouldn't you need to remake this whole video once FSR3.1 comes out? Considering the visual improvements that brings from the few screens we've seen it would be notable to consider (not as much though considering FSR3.1 unbinds the Frame Generation from the Upscaling so you could use FSR-FG with XeSS 1.3 on a Intel or AMD GPU theoretically)
I mean as upscaling techonology gets better they will have to redo this video a lof of times I imagine. I don't see why doing it now would be an issue.
@DelgaDude Because FSR 3.1 is very close to release. Nixxes have said that they've basically got it up and running in Ratchet & Clank and Horizon Forbidden West, and they're essentially just waiting for AMD to officially release it. But as usual, AMD is being ridiculously slow for literally no reason.
@alfo2804 "Soon" in this industry doesn't mean anything. It could be weeks or months... hell even years sometimes. Digital Foundry is also quick to make videos whenever something new comes out so I really don't see an issue.
They will make a new video later anyway.
Should’ve watched the full video mate
Not sure if win for AI learning or understaffed Radeon Group. 😅 Anyways good visual comparison and journalistic style. Looking forward to the FSR 3.1 video.😅
I'm a simple man. I hear 'A Walk in the Woods' and I like. Great work as always, Alex.
Hopefully dlss 3.7 finally fixes the God awful smearing in cyberpunk 2077 with Ray reconstruction enabled.
It does if you switch to preset E. Also fixes the lose of detail on cans rolling across the ground, and the blurring of pieces of paper blowing in the wind. Game uses preset D by default.
I tried it and yes it does, just replace the dlls.
@@retrowrath9374 I just watched a video that shows it no better (mainly issue when it's dark)
@@Sp3cialk304 how do you switch? I'll give a go
@@walker2006au I use DLSS Swapper to change the DLSS version. Or you can just manually replace the dll file. I use DLSS tweaks to change the preset. Both are easy to use, a KZhead video for each is probably easier to follow than text.
I just loved Intel XESS kick AMD FSR ❤❤❤
Can't wait for Stellar Blade!!!
Alex is my favourite. Thank you for Digital Foundry these kind of videos.
Something I wish you would address because a lot of people don't seem to understand it is that the reduction in input (pre-scaling) render resolution absolutely does reduce distant fidelity, even with DLSS, and even on "Ultra Quality". For open world games, this makes upscaling much less attractive as distant objects and areas with long view distance become frustratingly blurry much sooner than with native rendering.
As far as I know, DLSS shifts image every frame to get full frame data.
That depends on the specific implementation. Games need to use a negative LOD bias to preserve both object, and texture detail in the reconstructed image. Also, as so often, the comparison with "native resolution" doesn't really make sense. As Alex said in a video: "What does that even mean? It's just a number." Every real method of anti-aliasing (means not post-processing ones FXAA) is based on resolving subpixel detail, either by rendering pixels multiple times per frame (SSAA, MSAA), or by combining data from multiple frames (TAA, including modern reconstruction methods like DLSS). The more samples per pixel you have, the better the resulting image. Under these circumstances the idea of "native resolution rendering" is completely arbitrary and usually only used by people who don't really understand how rendering works.
that's the game developer's fault.
@@NeovanGoth No, that's nonsense, sorry. It's nonsense because no matter what type of smart jittering you do, unless we're talking about a completely static camera angle, an object on screen will only ever be represented by (area x ppi) pixels. Using a lower resolution, even if you're jittering it, still gives you less pixels to represent that object, even in the best case where you're standing still. If you're moving, as you almost assuredly are, a higher rendering resolution gives you more spatial resolution for distant objects. It just does period. It is really not a difficult concept. And no, "native resolution" is very far from an "arbitrary" concept. It is quite concrete and simple.
Does anyone else hear the Halo music in the background?!?!?
Yes :)
A walk in the woods 👌
It is :D
XeSS is going to be bult different, i haven't tested it myself but i can tell it will have the compatibility and performance of FSR with the quality of DLSS. Now they have just started in the performance part of the market, but it seems they've made big progress already in a really short amount of time which is why it looks like it'll be better then the 2 in the future.
Alex, where would you put TSR in the hierarchy?
Just wanted to point out that below 24 inches, DLSS even on balance in most games looks to be about the same as Native quality, FSR is very noticeable to me even on my 16 inch laptop.
Fsr is absolute garbage.
Feels great that the hard work of me and my team is getting such positive feedback!
Ok, so just so I am understanding: DLSS 3.00 and later is solely an updated version of their DLSS Super Resolution algorithm, plus frame gen and ray reconstruction, yes? Would we see any benefit in other games if we update our older DLSS nvngx files to a later version, even if for games that don't support Frame Gen/RayT and on older GPUs? Example I updated the DLSS file in EscapeFromTarkov to 3.7 but reddit said that the newest .dll file is still running DLSS 2.0. Guess I'm confused on what the nvngx versions mean
Those 3 features are on separate DLLs. Nvngx_dlss.dll is the super resolution/upscaler, nvngx_dlssg.dll is the frame generation DLL and nvngx_dlssd.dll is the ray reconstruction DLL. They're all being updated but new versions of each may come out at different times. When someone says the latest version is 2, they may just mean the super resolution/upscaler as that's the way it was marketed. Same as 3 being marketed as frame gen. But now they are all in version 3.x numbers. Though with multiplayer games like Escape from Tarkov, they may not even allow you to update the DLL yourself because of anti cheat (or risk ban) so perhaps they're saying the game officially is still on one of the 2.x versions and hasn't been updated to a newer version by the developers. The newer versions of the DLLs can have improved image quality and with 3.7 for the upscaler you get access to the new preset e that's not available in previous versions.
I want to watch, but at the same time I don't want to know how far behind FSR is.
They are comparing to FSR 2.2. So yeah, it isn't looking good
It's still doing okay if well integrated as seen in Horizon. And also soon to be replaced with FSR 3.1, which hopefully delivers.
@@Sorvetedchocolat what else can they compare to, its the latest version we have access to right now.
@@mustafacakiroglu_ Well, they modded updated versions of both XeSS and DLSS. They could as well mod the latest FSR update available, since it is open source. Anyway, I think the point of the video is to show XeSS' progress comparing it to its previous version and another machine learning solution like DLSS
@@Sorvetedchocolat you cannot mod fsr the same way you do with dlss and xess. he used the latest he can use.
FSR looks horrendous
DLSS too in various situations: shimmers/trails, smearing, blurring. 15:00 Native res > Upscaler any day.
@@desertfish74 Native is always better that's undisputed. The context was it's horrendous compared to the others.
never understood how people could accept the image quality of FSR. makes everything grainy, flickering and just look low res.
IMO, FSR2 simply doesn't hold up once you start to get below 1080p or so internal resolution. 1440p quality, aka 960p is pushing it for me, but FSR2 4k Performance is usually OK in games. WAY worse than native 4k of course, and honestly worse than native 1440p most of the time, but it's generally acceptable to my eyes, playing a on a TV. I can see for those using monitors I wouldn't imagine going below 4k balanced (1270p internal) though, it's just not a robust enough technology. 4K Quality usually looks pretty good, but at what point do you instead just do native 1440p and then get a higher framerate experience? I actually like when games will have FSR1 implementations still as an option. I like being able to set a game to native 1667p or 1440p and then have the native HUD elements. Looks a bit better than just running at those native resolutions due to the HUD, but if, and this is a big if, the TAA implementation is good it can still look decent. Here's to FSR3.1 hopefully fixing some of these issues.
it doesnt, stop being a fake gamer
Great video. This just confirms my utter disappointment with FSR in general, in many cases it's artifacting of movement, hair, and transparent objects can actually make the game look worse than if you just upscaled the image from the same native lower resolution. Glad to see XESS is closing the gap with DLSS, I'd love to see a native implementation of XESS on the Steam Deck for example, as even FSR2.2 in Quality mode looks pretty bad at 1280x800. AMD is killing it on their mobile gaming chips and APUs, but the lack of DLSS or any native good upscaling methods is really holding them back as an organization, I can't imagine anyone wanting to buy a high end AMD desktop CPU these days when Nvidia is so far ahead in terms of upscaling techniques and RT performance. That said, at least FS3 frame gen is actually pretty damn good and not far behind Nvidia's implementation. FSR3 + DLSS 2 on an Nvidia card with mods is actually not a bad combo at all, as it's much easier to inject than DLSS3 frame gen into existing games.
Idk if it's doable (4 screens) but adding Native image when comparing all 3 upscalers would have been nice to see how the image is supposed to look like in a "perfect" scenario
It would fit fine, maybe even better, as they could just do 4 quadrants of the screen.
By native, do you mean Native Res with TAA or Native res without any AA ?
@@rx58000with TAA of course. All upscalers have TAA at the end of the day
FSR 2 is gerbage...
Slightly disappointed DLSS 3.7 was such a small leap forward. I hope we aren’t approaching the point smartphones have reached - where there is not much to improve so updates become small and incremental like 3.7 was. I suppose something like DLSS 4 will need a major launch of a game sporting some fancy new rendering tech. I hope DLSS 4 focuses on improving a wider selection of games rather than making a select few look incredible.
there were some vram leaks for dlss4. less usage on vram and it should be available for all
In terms of reconstruction it will not change much. It has had a lot of year to train. What we will see is different way to integrate AI like they did with 3.0, 3.5 etc.
DLSS 4 should be the tech where they reduce the VRAM usage in games. DLSS 2 and 3.7 only related to the upscaling only.
@@JakiyyyyyUpscaling *is* a technique for reducing VRAM usage
@@DanKaschel Yes, and they want to reduce it further. Should cars not go faster because they already outmatch walking?
Why not use them all in max quality to show the best upscaling between them all so we can see what is better.
XeSS is awesome. I own both a nvidia card and a intel card and XeSS on a intel Arc card comes really close to DLSS. Also use it on my Legion Go over FSR most of the time.
My prediction. Upscaling will go the way of gsync and freesync. They will all improve at varying rates and speeds but eventually (years down the line) the differences will become "academic" and people won't care. The real battleground will be the techniques (like Ray Tracing) that Upscaling makes possible.
I'll take that bet. We are miles and miles away from what these techniques can do. Both quantitatively (ideal would be ~1000fps withl ~32k output res, dual for VR) and qualitatively (earlier injection into the pipeline -- potentially much earlier, potentially generating from structured data instead of raw frames with metadata).
eventually, but its also a much larger gap to what freesync and gsync ever had, and has a lot more competition, its wait until the competition catches to nvidias implementation from 3 years ago
@@DanKaschel He is right thought, the quality of them all will get to a point where it won't matter to most gamers any more and they will likely end up using the more open solution that works on more hardware. Once you get to a certain quality level, being best doesn't matter that much to most gamers. With XeSS closing the gap on DLSS and FSR 3.1 out soon, the gap is closing in the sense of being good enough for most to not care any more, which is likely to happen over the next few short years. We should remember that most gamers that come to DF are pixel peeping, most gamers don't care about all that, they care about good enough, if AMD delivers on what they promise with FSR 3.1 working much better at lower resolutions and removing a lot of the motion artefacts, that might be good enough for most gamers to not care any more on which upscale a game is using, but it's a big if on AMD delivering, but it does bold well that they are working on the biggest weaknesses of FSR which is motion artefacts and lower resolutions, especially with performance modes, if they do resolve those two issues, I suspect most of us won't care apart from the elites that like to zoom in 8 times to look for flaws.
@@paul1979uk2000 I guess it depends on how narrowly you define upscaling. In its current form, I agree. But I think the post-render pipeline will only get more important with time and in a decade will be more important than the render pipeline.
This is one of the reasons i don't buy AMD anymore. Even Intel caught up and has better scaling while it's their first GPU. I had so many issues with AMD and FSR. Also driver time-out's and other horrible AMD stuff like extreme power consumption at IDLE with 2 screens at 165hz. They claimed it to be fixed but it's a straight lie. As i have a power meter at the wall and i measure stuff like that to me AMD is the brand to avoid.
you're lost. i have never had an issue like any of these in the 2 years i've had a 6800 xt. maybe you just don't know what you're doing 💀 yes there was an idle power issue which was fixed btw... Also FSR 3.1 has promises to be a lot better with image quality. You can buy intel or nvidia if you want but don't spread misinformation about amd baby bro
@@vKobie 'promises', yeah, keep trusting AMD words🤣🤣. That's the same thing they said about fsr 2.2 and it's still a decade behind dlss
@@NamTran-xc2ip they have shown screenshots of it fixing the notorious "fizzling" problem at least in Ratchet and Clank. Me personally I have never had an issue with FSR 2.1 or 2.2 because I play at 4k. 4k FSR Quality looks great. So this is really a YALL problem and not a ME personally problem. Keep hating for no reason tho
@@vKobie 'Keep hating'. Apparently telling the truth that you don't like equals to hate. So because you don't have a problem that means everything is ok, AMD is the best. This stupid fanboy mindset is exactly why GPUs are expensive. Another uncomfortable truth is, DLSS performance looks better than FSR quality at 4k.
@@vKobie That power issue idle has never been fixed it's a lie! It was fixed for a number of screen but the majority not! I know very well what i am doing. I build pc's as a hobby. You people justr believe the lies from AMD. I have hard proof it was not fixed as i said. I have a dual monitor setup. And power usage idle was 88 watts with 1 screen at 165hz 1440p and the other 60hz at 1080p. Lowering it to 144hz on my main dropped it to 45 watts idle. Lowering it to 60 and it was about 15-20 watts wich it should be! On my 4080 super now it uses 20 watt in the 165hz 1440p and 1080p config. You people believe to much AMD propaganda! I have a powermeter at the wall as well so i can test individual parts of the pc and theur usage. FSR is horrible. Just look at the footage of it! I had a RX7900XT and played Alan Wake 2 and in the forest the fern plants on the floor would go crazy turning all sides when you aproached them, no issue on my 4080 S! Or World of Wacraft getting driver time-out messages and my screen frooze for 15- 30 sec! Never with my Nvidia. I had the 6800XT before and same issue! So drivers are broken with AMD. Thats a fact! The only thing why others don't always have the issue, is luck with their components like screens and simply because people are blind and don't see shit. AMD is for people that want crap experience Nvidia you pay more and you get the best. I only use A tier components in my pc nothing less. With AMD always shit. I had a Ryzen 9 5900X not to bad. But still sometimes it did not post to Windows and a hard reset was needed. Besides that it was ok, but RAM you could not push at all with 4 dimms because the Infinity fabric would just crash. Now with my Intel I7-14700KF it's rocksolid at 6000 mts. So you all keep buying AMD please so Nvidia/Intel does'nt get even more expensive.
More curious to see how these techniques compare in low resolution situations to get an idea of how they impact current and future handhelds like the steam deck.
can't wait to see how PSSR compares
just buy an nvidia card. you dont have to deal with any of this and you can use all three.
Buy a Radeon or Arc GPU so you don't have to deal with Ngreedia
Yep NV is the way.
@@JoeHoeDoesSomethingWhat does "dealing with Ngreedia" mean here, exactly? If they offer a better product than the competition in pretty much every conceivable way, and have more features, the only thing you can do is undercut them, which is what AMD and Intel are doing. The GPU market is still almost a monopoly, sadly
Buy Nvidia, then wonder why their low-mid range stagnate and cost a lot. If you want to buy "it just works' that's fine, but you'll further expand the performance gap for really high prices
@@NootNoot. You don't need to buy every year. bought the 1080ti, 3070 laptop and now 4090. Can't say I have any regrets. Probably another half a decade minimum before needing an upgrade again.
AMD: "We might offer the worst solution, but at least everyone can get the worst solution equally."
Great analysis, but I would have added a framerate comparison between all of the different upscalers. The DP4A path tends to have better image quality than FSR, but worse performance. I'd have liked to see a comparison between them to see if Intel has improved the performance on the DP4A pathway.
I wish DLSS didn't have massive ghosting on digital screens in flight simulator :(
Imagine what a big L it is for AMD that Intel comes out of nowhere making a gpu and more impressive a DLSS competitor that is already better than FSR. I hate that consoles use AMD.
You can use XeSS on an AMD gpu, maybe an L for AMD but a big win for AMD users
LOL. There you have two big Ls. Intel´s driver where a mess at release and still are worse than AMD´s
The consoles can use xess they are fairly new
Modded FSR 2.1 in HFW (and in any game) eliminates the pixelation issue in motion. I have a video on my channel showcasing it. So what you said in 17:56 is actually wrong.
I always stare at the comparisons and 90% of the time i cant see the differences :)
Man … if Aliens find us, I hope they don’t look at KZhead comment sections