I am suitably impressed for a '1.0' attempt, however the usefulness seems far more limited (ultra quality or quality at 4k, ultra quality at 1440p, 1080p is a gamble to even use ultra quality), where the cards and resolutions that want or need to gain the most, stand to benefit somewhat less. DLSS does do an undeniably better job at making significantly lower input resolution less blurry. Neither is without their drawbacks.
Make no mistake though, in every mode, you are making your presentation softer, It's admirably better than fxcas + downscale, or equivalents, but even 4k native VS 4k ultra quality, which represents a best case scenario, FSR is not as sharp, for those that demand only the cleanest, sharpest image anyway. It also appears to worsen shimmer when it's present in the native image, one of my most disliked atifacts personally.
Now that it's out, AMD'S game is the same as Nvidia's is, refinement, and above all adoption.
For this generation at least, perhaps another or more, Nvidia RTX users seem to be the biggest winners when it comes to choice, DLSS support in supported titles, FSR in others and hopefully some crossover.
Quote from Alex from DF, Interesting take.
Alex here from Digital Foundry -
reading other reviews I think there is a general misapprehension happening about AMD's FSR in the tech press, so my review reads or watches rather differently. **FSR is an image upscaling technique**, like a bilinear or bicubic upscale you can do in photoshop. AMD's own tech briefing and information describes FSR as an uspcaling technique to be compared with simple image space upscalers like Bilinear or Lanczos or Bicubic. It is better than those simple upscalers for the purpose of a video game image.
**AMD's FSR is not an image reconstruction technique** like checkerboard rendering, DLSS 1.0, DLSS 2.0, Temporal Anti-Aliasing Upscaling, or a variety of techniques which look to reconstruct the image's higher level detail beyond the spatial realm while Anti-Aliasing that new image information.
**FSR is similarly not Antialiasing** - FSR comes after a game has already been anti-aliased and inherits the qualities, faults, and benefits of the anti-aliasing technique of the game in question.
The questions of FSR's usefulness is important within the context of what a game offers in its settings menu. If for some reason a game literally only offers basic image upscaling with a slider that uses bilinear filtering, or none of that and just has resolution options, then FSR will produce a more pleasing image than those options. **But it is not and should not be thought of as an alternative to real image reconstruction techniques.**
I say this for the academic purpose of properly classifying things, but also because practically, All people who game on PC should hope that devs implement something like Temporal Anti-Aliasing Upscaling in their game and not only offer something like FSR. TAA U is doing something completely different that has transformative image quality effects and should be desired.
