User preference to super resolution technologies such as NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS, beat playing games without them, at native resolution, in the latest TechPowerUp Frontpage Poll. Spanning nearly a month of polling and over 29,260 votes, the poll provides an interesting insight into the minds of today's gamers. It suggests that gamers are willing to explore super resolution technologies to make their games playable with higher eye-candy, as opposed to playing at native resolutions with watered down settings. The question we asked was what setting of super resolution do gamers use, with "native" suggesting a lack of super resolution. Native could include presets such as DLAA or FSR Native, which render the game at native resolution while using the upscaler to work like an AA technology, smoothing out edges.

Native resolution scored 13,024 votes, or 44.5% of the votes. It is the single largest response, but given that every other response is tied to some form of super resolution, it becomes a minority response. Native is followed by "Quality" preset at 38.8% or 11,341 votes. The "Balanced" present, which tends to be the default super resolution preset in most games, trails "Quality" by a significant margin, scoring just 8.9% of the vote, or 2,593 votes. Only trace sections of our users pick "performance" and "ultra performance" presets that tend to render the game at significantly lower resolutions to make it playable. "Performance" got 4.7% (1,376 votes), followed by "Ultra Performance" at 3.2% or 930 votes.The voting patterns suggest that gamers do want to use super resolution, and are willing to pick either "Quality" or "Balanced" presets, leaning greatly toward "Quality." Native remains the single largest mode, and a significant minority of 44.5% wants GPUs to be able to play today's games without the crutches of super resolution tech. The split between "Quality" and "Balanced" suggests that when enabling super resolution technologies, gamers do tend to take the time to manually pick the preset to "Quality" from the default "Balanced," suggesting that they don't just flick super resolution on, and are conscious of what kind of super resolution they want. If you were to club "Native" with "Quality," they make an overwhelming 83% of the vote—people want their experience to be either at native or as close to native as possible.

However, considering how terribly some game releases in 2024 ran, upscaling if often the only solution for playable frame rates, especially on systems with weaker GPU hardware. Last but not least, DLSS and FSR are activated by default in many games, which might affect a lot of gamers who just select a settings profile and don't look closer whether they have upscaling enabled or not.