Within the last few years, it seems upscaling tech has become a necessity for gaming across a broad range of systems. From high-end PCs to even Nintendo home consoles, every system now relies on some form of upscaling to render pixels on the screen. When it comes to upscaling, Nvidia DLSS is arguably the best. However, over the last few years, AMD’s FSR and even Intel’s XeSS have caught up to Team Green’s upscaling tech.
In fact, I recently tested a few games with DLSS and FSR Frame Generation. Surprisingly, combining DLSS with FSR FG gave me far better results than using the former’s frame-gen tech.
AMD’s FSR outperforms DLSS Frame Generation
But there are some caveats
Although I’ve never been a fan of upscaling, especially on PC, I’ve softened up a bit. I still prefer to play my games at native resolution whenever possible. But let’s be real, upscaling is more or less mandatory, regardless of your PC specifications. On my gaming rig, I’m running an RTX 4070, which, admittedly, isn’t the most powerful GPU. However, it plays most games pretty well at 1440p. To save VRAM bandwidth, I usually use DLSS at the Balanced preset.
However, while recently testing the GPU for my DLSS 5 experiments using the DLSS Swapper mod, I found out that I can use both DLSS and FSR at the same time, albeit for different upscaling functions.
Both upscaling and frame generation, despite being grouped under the same DLSS or FSR banner, are completely separate. Frame Generation does rely on upscaling, but it can work without it as well, as long as the supported technology, i.e., DLSS or FSR, is supported by the GPU.
FSR Frame Generation works really well, but you do need good base frame rates to compensate for the latency.
For my tests, I used my main PC, which has an RTX 4070, an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X, and 16GB of memory. The games that I tested were:
- Marvel Rivals
- Control Resonant
- Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered
- Dragon’s Dogma 2
- Final Fantasy XVI
- Monster Hunter Wilds
While games like Marvel Rivals and Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered support using upscaling and frame generation separately, not all the games on my list did that. For those games, I forced DLSS at a driver level, while using FSR Frame Generation in-game.
|
Game |
Frame Rate with DLSS Quality (No Frame Generation) |
Frame Rate with DLSS Quality + DLSS Frame Generation |
Frame Rate with DLSS Quality + FSR Frame Generation |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Marvel Rivals |
107FPS |
174FPS |
182FPS |
|
Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered |
98FPS |
130FPS |
141FPS |
|
Control Resonant |
89FPS |
101FPS |
97FPS |
|
Dragon’s Dogma 2 |
91FPS |
118FPS |
122FPS |
|
Final Fantasy XVI |
71FPS |
93FPS |
85FPS |
|
Monster Hunter Wilds |
87FPS |
105FPS |
112FPS |
Apart from Final Fantasy XVI and Control Resonant, DLSS with FSR Frame Generation worked surprisingly well on most games I tested. There are some caveats to that, but if I were to use frame generation for, well, more frame rate, I would happily choose FSR FG over DLSS. That said, using FSR FG on a DLSS-supported card robs me of Nvidia Reflex.
If you tend to play your games on a controller, it’s not that big of an issue. However, on keyboard and mouse, you will need Reflex alongside DLSS Frame Generation to balance out the additional latency.
Not all games support multiple upscaling algorithms at the same time
And for good reasons
While the games I tested let you choose upscaling and frame generation separately, this isn’t the industry norm. Most games club frame generation with upscaling tech. This happens even on consoles. For instance, the recently released Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen on the Nintendo Switch 2 offers frame-gen support. However, it’s exclusively tied to the game’s DLSS upscaling tech. This is despite the game supporting FSR FG on PC.
Still, there’s a very good reason developers choose to bundle upscaling and frame-gen together. Although upscaling (and FG) do boost your base frame rates, they aren’t necessarily cheap.
Using DLSS, FSR, or even XeSS requires significant CPU bandwidth. Now, if you’re using two completely separate upscaling algorithms at the same time, it’s going to be even more taxing on the CPU as well as the GPU. That’s also why it’s not recommended to use frame-gen if your system is CPU-bottlenecked.
Nvidia’s DLSS still has the edge over FSR, at least for now
I’m really impressed by how far FSR has come since I last used it on my now ancient AMD Radeon RX 6600. I remember FSR2 being so blurry that I had to lock my games to 45FPS so I could play at native 1080p without dealing with upscaling. However, now I have to inspect screenshots and recorded gameplay footage closely to spot any noticeable difference between FSR and DLSS, and if I had to choose, I’d still pick DLSS over FSR.
My biggest issue with FSR has always been the ghosting trails that show up in vegetation textures and when motion blur is enabled. Unfortunately, it’s still an issue in FSR3, albeit to a lesser degree.
Now, DLSS also has its fair share of ghosting issues. However, it’s way less noticeable during gameplay. Furthermore, DLSS4.5 offers far better antialiasing than any other upscaling tech that I’ve used. Intel’s XeSS certainly comes close, but it’s not as performant as DLSS on my RTX GPUs. On AMD GPUs, however, I would happily go with FSR3, be it for upscaling or frame-gen.