When Nvidia first announced its Deep-Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology for its new graphics cards back in 2018, much of it sounded like magic. AI-assisted temporal antialiasing? Neural nets? More performance for free?
Nowadays, though, turning on DLSS has become second nature to many gamers, with major titles like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Fortnite supporting the frame-quickening technology in their respective engines. But DLSS has also enjoyed an uncontested position for most of its life as the only supersampling option out there. Now, a new entry from AMD, dubbed FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), aims to democratize a feature that Nvidia has restricted to owners of a particular set of graphics cards. (Nvidia-branded ones, of course.)
Instead of relying on expensive hardware to drive its supersampling tech, AMD uses a shader-level implementation, giving FSR a vastly larger number of compatible GPU options for gamers to choose among. But will that shader-based approach live up to the same level of quality and performance we’ve come to expect from games enhanced with Nvidia’s DLSS? Until now, it was hard to compare supersampled apples to supersampled apples. Until this peach came along: Myst.
With the recent relaunch of Myst for PC and Xbox, we decided to put the two options head-to-head for the first time, testing both the visual fidelity and the frame rate of the game to see which supersampler comes out on top.
AMD and Nvidia have gone toe-to-toe for years in the battle for hardware supremacy. But now, it’s AI’s turn to pick up a pike and head to the frontlines. Let’s see how the battle turned out…
AMD FSR vs. Nvidia DLSS: How Does Supersampling Work?
First up, a quick primer on supersampling. If you’ve been following our coverage of both Nvidia’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR over the years, you likely already know how these two technologies work.
For anyone who’s just tuning in, a quick definition. Supersampling is a process in which a game is rendered by your graphics card at a lower resolution than the output of your monitor, and is then upscaled, or “supersampled,” back up to the intended output resolution. Why? Well, to increase performance, of course!
Say, for example, you’re running a game at 4K resolution. If the GPU is natively rendering all 8.3 million pixels of each frame, it’s going to have to work more than twice as hard as it would to render at 2,560 by 1,440 pixels. By turning on Nvidia DLSS or AMD FSR to “Quality Mode” (one of several available, from “Ultra Quality’ to “Ultra Performance,” depending on the game), your output image will, in theory, look as good as 4K. But it’s actually rendering on the graphics card at a resolution closer to 1440p.
This effectively increases the frame rate of the game and eases the burden on the GPU, all without sacrificing the fidelity of the image to do it.
Now, down-rendering like this is nothing new, and multiplayer gamers in particular have been manually adjusting their resolution for extra performance for years. But what is new is the process of upscaling those graphics back to a point where they’re (hopefully) indiscernible from a native render. And that’s a technique that differs depending on the underlying approach. And you can bet that Nvidia and AMD have different approaches.
Nvidia Deep-Learning Supersampling (DLSS)
DLSS debuted as an idea during the launch of Nvidia’s 20 Series GPUs in 2018. (You know, remember when $1,200 was crazy money for a graphics card?) It became a reality in games like Final Fantasy XV and Battlefield V a few months after that.
The feature first launched as DLSS 1.0 around October of that year, and it was derided at the time by many as a blurry, smudgy mess that often made games look worse without a substantial-enough performance boost to justify the cost of a new graphics card on its own.
Today’s DLSS is significantly improved, though, and is available for any Nvidia graphics cards that sport an “RTX” badge. (Think the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 or RTX 3070 Ti, just to name two.) While that “R” stands for “raytracing,” it also implies the inclusion of what Nvidia refers to as “Tensor Cores,” a separate set from the RT or CUDA cores that power raytracing and rasterization, respectively. Though it’s just a bit more complicated under the hood, think of Tensor Cores as the engines that drive DLSS, processing the output of Nvidia’s Neural Graphics Framework (NGX) neural net on your local hardware.
Nvidia’s most recent update to its AI-assisted supersampling tech, DLSS 2.0 (and its iterative versions following, such as DLSS 2.2), have slowly been gaining in broader game adoption since launching last March. The latest version of DLSS 2.2 relies on a process known as “temporal feedback” image training to generate that data, created by Nvidia. In it, it runs a lower-resolution render of a game’s images and motion vectors through NGX, which then cross-checks those images against an “ultra-high quality 16K reference image” to produce the final upscaled render.
The thing is, while Nvidia has managed to snag some big-name games since then, even three years after the launch of version 1.0, DLSS is still supported on only around 60 titles in total.
Its slow adoption rate is indicative of the difficulty of training games on Nvidia’s proprietary system, a closed loop that gets even smaller once you consider the current sky-high pricing of RTX 20 and 30 Series GPUs. The GTX brand continues to hold up the budget end of Nvidia’s graphics-card stable and accounts for the majority of the company’s sales, while RTX cards remain a premium option afforded to a select percentage of PC gamers.
Here’s the list of GPU series that support DLSS as of September 2021:
- Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 Series GPUs
- Nvidia GeForce RTX 20 Series GPUs
- That’s it.
This cuts off access to supersampling for anyone who wants to spend less than $329 MSRP, which was the floor set by the RTX 3060 at launch (not accounting for the current drastic inflation in card prices). Perhaps spotting a potential hole in the armor, rival AMD set out to change what we thought to expect from supersampling.
AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR)
Leave it to AMD to open-source the whole thing. Announced as an addition to AMD’s growing list of free, open-source tools available as a part of its GPUOpen developer toolkit, FSR supersamples in-game images at the shader level to achieve a similar result to Nvidia’s DLSS (more performance with no loss of visuals), albeit with a much more flexible hardware requirement. How flexible, exactly?
For starters, let’s list which discrete (and integrated!) GPUs will work with AMD FSR…
- AMD Radeon 6000/M Series
- AMD Radeon 5000/M Series
- AMD Radeon VII
- AMD Radeon RX Vega Series
- AMD Radeon 600 Series
- AMD Radeon RX 500 Series
- AMD Radeon RX 480, 470 and 460
- AMD Ryzen desktop CPUs with AMD Radeon graphics
- AMD Ryzen mobile CPUs with Radeon Graphics
- Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 Series
- Nvidia GeForce RTX 20 Series
- Nvidia GeForce 16 Series
- Nvidia GeForce 10 Series
But AMD wasn’t finished there, though, also extending FSR compatibility to…
- Xbox One
- Xbox Series X
- Xbox Series S
- macOS
Phew! While we catch our breath, consider the implication of FSR compared with DLSS in the context of compatible hardware. AMD’s shader-based approach means that almost anything with a graphics chip inside could, in theory, run a version of FSR as long as game developers work to integrate the feature at the engine level.
This opens up a massive number of potential users that Nvidia doesn’t have access to on its RTX platform. However, thus far, that engine-level shader integration style hasn’t yet translated into widespread adoption. As of this writing, FSR works on just 17 games, and not all of them are recent hits. Far Cry 6 is a big get, to be sure, and adding nine more games in two months is a great start. But it may be a while before AMD is able to deliver on some of the promises it set for itself during FSR’s announcement presentation.
Until the launch of Myst last week (and other than an indie title called Necromuda: Hired Gun in late May), no titles supported both FSR and Nvidia in the same engine, making it impossible to compare the two one-to-one either on the basis of either quality or performance. Now, with at least one of those codes in our hands, the time has finally come. DLSS has been out for just under three years, while AMD’s FSR hasn’t even been live for three months. How do their supersampling efforts stack up side-by-side? Let’s take a look at each…
Myst: Quality and Performance Tested on FSR 1.0 and DLSS 2.2
To remove as many variables as possible, we tested Myst on our graphics card testbed (see its specs in our How We Test Graphics Cards article), using the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition. This latest refresh of Myst is a complete rebuild from the ground up, and represents an exact recreation of the original Myst first released in 1993 (modernized this time in Unreal Engine 4.26 by the original studio). This renewed version was first launched (and reviewed) on the Oculus Quest back in December of last year, and is now seeing its full PC launch this month.
Because Myst lacks an in-game benchmark, all results were recorded below using the FRAPS frame-rate tracking software. We recorded frame rates doing a manual run that involved moving up and down a house, then slaloming through a set of trees, over 30 seconds of recording.
We tested Myst on version 1.0 of AMD’s FSR, which is compatible with the RTX 3080, and on version 2.2 of Nvidia’s DLSS. We first ran the game at native 4K to get a baseline result, then performed two DLSS passes—one in Quality Mode and one in Ultra Performance Mode.
The same was done on AMD’s FSR, hitting both ends of the performance spectrum with runs in Ultra Quality Mode and Performance Mode. We used the Epic quality preset in the in-game graphics settings menu to push this 27-year-old game, albeit one that was recently rebooted and rebuilt using the relatively modern Unreal Engine 4.26, to its limits.
Myst Screenshots: PC and Xbox FSR/DLSS Quality Comparison
First up, a quality comparison, because you can downrender any game all day…but it’s only about how good it looks on the upscale that really matters, right?
We took all our screenshots and performance data while the game was running at 4K resolution (3,840 by 2,160 pixels), in order to the capture the best representation of what the tech could do at both ends of the quality spectrum.
Myst Compared on the PC
First, let’s dive into the PC comparison. (Important: You can click the button in the top right corner of the slideshow below for the option to view these images in full-screen mode.)
I’ll start off by saying that as someone who’s been testing DLSS 1.0 since day one, going through these images shows how far supersampling has come in such a short amount of time. Whether through DLSS or FSR, the effect of supersampling in Myst produced some spectacularly deceptive results, with Ultra Performance Mode in DLSS and Performance Mode in FSR just barely giving a glimpse at the illusion behind the curtain when taking still screenshots.
The game held up just fine in motion in both supersamplers—though no one is really looking for that crisp whip-pan headshot in Myst, admittedly—with almost no discernible differences between DLSS and FSR. FSR still retained some artifacts of what can only be described as a “fuzzy ghostiness” around edges of objects while the camera was in rapid motion. However, you’d really have to be looking for it to notice, and even then, only on monitors above a 200Hz refresh rate, with a higher level of adaptive sync (G-Sync Ultimate or FreeSync Premium) to “give away the ghost,” as it were.
Other than that minor complaint, FSR continues to be an uncannily great offering compared with DLSS, already doing what Nvidia took three years to master while remaining compatible with a much larger library of both discrete and integrated hardware. DLSS also looks great in these shots, of course, and its performance is nothing to sniff at (more on that in a minute). However, its hardware-bound “Tensor Core tax,” as I’ve called it before (that is, the cost of RTX cards, especially these days), could now be Nvidia’s undoing in the face of what AMD’s accomplished with FSR.
And just what has AMD accomplished with FSR? Well how about bringing supersampling to the console market, for starters?
Xbox
This relaunch of Myst is also available for the Xbox Series X/S, as well as the Xbox One, and brings with it compatibility with AMD’s FSR. Until now, supersampling tech (heck, even sharpening tech) was restricted to the PC. But with AMD’s shader-based approach to supersampling, in contrast to Nvidia’s Tensor Core-based DLSS, developers can bring the once- hardware-locked feature to the masses.
As Myst is the first game to support supersampling on consoles (a potentially huge market for the frame-boosting tech going forward), we thought it would be a good idea to also get a look at how Myst performed with FSR turned on and off using an Xbox Series X. Check out this series of three image pairs (again, click the upper-right button to get a full-screen view)…
If you’re having a hard time telling the difference between the two images above…good! That means FSR is doing its job, adding performance without taking away from the visual fidelity of the image. It’s clear that the Xbox is running both the textures and lighting at a lower level than what we saw on our RTX 3080-powered desktop run, but this only makes the application of FSR that much harder to detect.
Myst’s developers say that FSR was the key in getting the game up to 4K/60fps on the Xbox Series X, and a smooth 60fps on the Xbox Series S. Now, of course, no Xbox comes with Nvidia parts inside, least of all either a GeForce RTX 20 or 30 Series GPU with Tensor Cores on board. This means we can’t compare how well DLSS would run on an Xbox because, well, it can’t. It also meant no performance data. However, we were able to snag that from our PC runs…
Myst Performance Benchmarks (PC)
Right off the bat, let’s clear the air about the difference between a tech demo and something that people might actually use: Do you need to run Myst, a famously slow, relatively static PC puzzler that involves about as much fast-paced movement as a concert at a public library, quickly? Probably not. But it’s what we have to test, and Unreal Engine 4 kept Myst easily humming above the 60fps mark in native resolution.
Those disclaimers out of the way, let’s see how the two fared with Epic graphics settings rendered in “4K”…
Well, there’s a surprise. For all of Nvidia’s posturing about AI-assisted this and Tensor Core that, AMD’s shader-based FSR doesn’t just look as good as DLSS in Myst, it manages to run ever-so-slightly faster in Quality Mode, too.
Overall, the numbers are pretty tight here, though, with AMD’s FSR adding 77% and 158% more frames per second in Ultra Quality and Performance Mode, respectively. Nvidia, meanwhile, traded off a loss for a victory, losing in the Quality run at “just” 58% more fps, and scoring a win with an increase of 163% more frames in the Ultra Performance preset.
I’ve been waiting to see how this duel would shake out since AMD first announced FSR, and I’ll admit I’m a bit stunned to see FSR keep up so easily with DLSS here. Nvidia has spent hours of valuable briefing time going over all the special math and engineering behind DLSS, justifying why the Tensor Tax is worth it. And here comes AMD with an open-source, totally free, and flexible solution that upends Nvidia’s messaging.
A Developer Chimes In
But enough about our results. What do developers think? We spoke to the studio behind Myst about the process of integrating each tech via Unreal, and they presented a pretty balanced picture of what future developers should expect to get supersampling working on their next titles. According to Hannah Gamiel, Development Director…
“FSR and DLSS were fairly painless to integrate into our flavor of Unreal Engine. We did the integration ourselves but were lucky enough to work directly with Nvidia and AMD to make sure Myst worked well with both DLSS and FSR. They mesh decently with each other in the engine…it’s been a real breeze integrating each solution.
So it sounds like both had their benefits and drawbacks when it came to engine integration. Where does that leave us on a winner?
Myst Speedrunners, Get Those Thumbs Ready…
As Moore’s Law continues to do whatever people say Moore’s Law is up to this morning (who can really keep track these days?), finding creative solutions to the problem of GPU hardware getting more difficult and more expensive to manufacture will be a necessity. FSR and DLSS can help to fill a gap toward a benchmark that many desktop gamers were having trouble hitting already—4K gaming at 60fps—and could even extend that privilege down to both console players, and even the mobile set, sooner than we all think.
FSR and DLSS are great for everyone, to be sure, but perhaps their greatest impact yet will be felt on the push to get 4K/60 quite literally into the hands of gamers this holiday season. Myst works on PC, which means by all accounts it should also work on Valve’s upcoming mobile PC/Game Gear-lookalike, the Steam Deck, and just how fast it runs there will determine the next battleground for the supersamplers. Now that FSR has come to consoles and integrated GPUs, it’s only a matter of time before Xbox players and Steam Deck buyers are looking into higher-refresh displays, while Nintendo and Nvidia fans look toward the future.
The key takeaway from our testing above is this: While Nvidia’s DLSS remains impressive, it’s no longer the most impressive supersampler on the block, and it may not be worth the upfront Tensor Core Tax anymore. The honors now go to AMD and its FidelityFX Super Resolution tech, along with the company’s devotion to the OpenGPU open-source developer’s toolkit. By democratizing supersampling into open-source, FSR makes it possible for PC and console gamers alike to take full advantage of this new upscaled future. This could (hopefully) mean people getting more out of the GPUs they already own rather than having to buy new cards to keep pace, easing demand and allowing supply to catch up.
While DLSS certainly isn’t going away (in fact, we expect its adoption to explode with the next Switch launch), its hardware-based approach may eventually doom it to the “Remember that?” fate of HD-DVDs and Betamax tapes if Nvidia isn’t careful. On performance in Myst, FSR and DLSS are just about even, depending on the preset applied, and to my eye I’d say that visual quality is another near-photo-finish race. But there’s only one tech here that gives both GeForce GTX and Radeon RX GPU owners the opportunity to enjoy the same supersampling benefits, and that’s AMD’s FSR.
The sheer number of integrated and discrete graphics cards that support FSR already makes it the more accessible option by far. But then, when you back that up with results that are either on par, or sometimes even better than DLSS? Nvidia looks more expensive (and unnecessarily exclusive) by the day.
Nvidia’s DLSS AITH (ace in the hole) could be widespread adoption with every game that has temporal antialiasing (TAA) already integrated into the engine…however the rumor of that feature, along with any news on DLSS 3.0, hasn’t found much fuel in more than a year now. As of the testing we saw today, Nvidia’s last remaining advantage in this fight is that sometimes the Quality Mode of a DLSS-ed game can somehow appear crisper and clearer than the native render, something that I haven’t seen yet in my testing of FSR.
That leaves DLSS, at the moment, as more of a marketing tool for justifying buying more expensive RTX cards (along with ray-tracing capabilities, of course), while FSR is a true effort to bring higher-quality and higher-performance gaming to as many players as possible. This makes FSR AMD’s first real slam dunk on Nvidia in years. And we hope it leads to a world where DLSS 3.0 steps up the game even further to keep Big Green on the court, and the royal battle raging.
