Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora: DLSS 2 vs. FSR 3 Comparison

[maxus24]

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is out now on PC, with support for AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3) upscaling and Frame Generation technology. Also supported is NVIDIA's DLSS Super Resolution. In this mini-review we compare the image quality and performance gains offered by these technologies.

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[LazyGamer]

There is no FSR Quality. There is" FSR crap" and "FSR somewhat less crap. "

 

[rv8000]

There is no Upscaling Quality. There is"Upscaling crap" and "Upscaling somewhat less crap. "

FTFY

 

[Panyamin]

Hi,

thanks for the review!

I would like to suggest you to use tools such as AutoHotkey or Microsoft Power Automate, to register or create a sequence of keys in order to make the video comparison in order to get the same video gameplay clip with different settings. What do you think?

 

[Legacy-ZA]

Thank you for this article, it's very insightful.

There is no FSR Quality. There is" FSR crap" and "FSR somewhat less crap. "

I am very impressed with FSR and what you can get out of it, without it being hardware locked.

 

[Avro Arrow]

Looking at the two (sliding back and forth at the different resolutions), I will concede that the DLSS looks marginally better but there is a more important question that must be asked:

Do either of these technologies produce a picture at a level of quality that could be considered to be bothersome?

My answer to that would be a definite "no" because, let's face it, they both look pretty damn awesome. This means that if you only have one or the other, you'd be perfectly happy with it regardless of which one it is. I have never said that DLSS doesn't produce a better quality image than FSR (because of course it does), but I have always said they're so close to each other that neither of them would be detrimental to my overall gaming experience. I don't look at backgrounds when I'm playing a game, I'm too busy looking for an item or an enemy NPC. As long as the background looks "good enough" (and both of these exceed my threshold of "good enough" by quite a margin), then I really don't care which one I use. Both of these technologies are excellent at what they do and I have little interest in splitting the hairs that separate them.

 

[alfablac]

Looking at the two (sliding back and forth at the different resolutions), I will concede that the DLSS looks marginally better but there is a more important question that must be asked:

Do either of these technologies produce a picture at a level of quality that could be considered to be bothersome?

My answer to that would be a definite "no" because, let's face it, they both look pretty damn awesome. This means that if you only have one or the other, you'd be perfectly happy with it regardless of which one it is. I have never said that DLSS doesn't produce a better quality image than FSR (because of course it does), but I have always said they're so close to each other that neither of them would be detrimental to my overall gaming experience. I don't look at backgrounds when I'm playing a game, I'm too busy looking for an item or an enemy NPC. As long as the background looks "good enough" (and both of these exceed my threshold of "good enough" by quite a margin), then I really don't care which one I use. Both of these technologies are excellent at what they do and I have little interest in splitting the hairs that separate them.

At motion it's great and I found on par with native, to not say they are the same.
But for FSR I got a lot of flickering. Tried messing with vsync and fixing fps but it doesn't change. Pretty weird. (I have a 4090 card)

 

[Avro Arrow]

At motion it's great and I found on par with native, to not say they are the same.
But for FSR I got a lot of flickering. Tried messing with vsync and fixing fps but it doesn't change. Pretty weird. (I have a 4090 card)

That's pretty weird because I've messed around, testing FSR with Starfield on my XTX and while it's not perfect, it doesn't flicker like that and I often forget when I have it on. You never can tell what actually causes things like this. It could be a bad FSRS implementation, it might be the game or it could also be how this FSR implementation interacts with your 4090.

Software can be such a mess sometimes!

 

[Fluffmeister]

The beauty of going Nvidia, you can use both, or neither! Hey ho.

 

[Beermotor]

I expect that eventually upscaling tech will be absorbed into the DirectX and Vulkan specs by their respective governing bodies.

It's happened before.

 

[nguyen]

hm...waterfall looks completely pixelated on 4K FSR.Quality vs 4K DLSS Performance

Left: 4K FSR Quality
Right: 4K DLSS Performance

 

[wolf]

It's nice to see FSR continue to improve after a quite a long time on 2.2 - I'm sure Radeon and pre-RTX series owners will appreciate that. Also really cool to see the Ultra Quality modes make an appearance without needing to employ tweaks. Not sure this is my kind of game but I'm keen to play it soon and see for myself.

 

[Prima.Vera]

Hold on. Can you use FSR Frame Generation on NVidia cards??

 

[Midiamp]

Hold on. Can you use FSR Frame Generation on NVidia cards??

Yes. That's the whole point of FSR, it's open source. As long your card supports DX11, you can use FSR.

 

[AusWolf]

Wow! I haven't seen a game where DLSS/FSR are so close to native rendering in image quality. I had to read the conclusion to spot most of the differences.

As someone who infamously bashes upscaling technology around every corner and tries to avoid it like the plague, I have to admit, I'm impressed.

 

[Prima.Vera]

Hold on. Can you use FSR Frame Generation on NVidia cards??

Even Frame Generation?

 

[usiname]

Even Frame Generation?

If added on game level yes, if the implementation is on drivers level you need RX 7000

 

[mama]

Is a special driver required for frame generation for this game or is it activated in the menu?

 

[alfablac]

Is a special driver required for frame generation for this game or is it activated in the menu?

Frame Gen is only active if you use FSR

 

[CyberPomPom]

Is a special driver required for frame generation for this game or is it activated in the menu?

No specific driver or hardware required if FSR is in the game, like in this one.
AMD got a specific FSR working on a driver level (it's the old version of it that is okayish) that work on everything.
And they have AFMF on the work, that is the frame generation on the driver level for all DX11 and up games, currently in beta.

 

[Vya Domus]

Is a special driver required for frame generation for this game or is it activated in the menu?

You activate it in the menu, it works on any GPU, it just runs on shaders like any other graphical effect.

It's kind of sad how confused people are after being so used to closed proprietary software from Nvidia.

 

[AusWolf]

You activate it in the menu, it works on any GPU, it just runs on shaders like any other graphical effect.

It's kind of sad how confused people are after being so used to closed proprietary software from Nvidia.

I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually turned out that Nvidia's super high-tech deep learning thingies also run on shaders just as fine and the whole Tensor-bollocks was just a sad attempt to sell AI to gamers.

Edit: Or maybe the Tensor cores are an indivisible part of the GPU architecture from Turing onwards because Nvidia is focusing on datacentre GPUs, and there's literally zero benefit for gamers, hence, DLSS was born.

 

[remekra]

Just another proof that FSR can look good if devs implement it correctly with tweaking, rather than just put it in so that it's there and is usable on consoles where you sit far from TV.
You can compare how vegation looks here and in other games that use FSR and have vegetation and difference is stark.

But i'm honestly impressed at Frame Gen quality. Turned it on and even on lower fps (Unobtainum settings) it does not produce much visible artifacts (except for HUD). At 60fps turning it on seems like a no brainer, I have LG OLED 42C2 and going from 60 to 110-120 really improves motion clarity without lag that I can feel. I'm not a pro-gamer that cares about every ms of input lag mind you but still really impressive, considering that they do not need specialized hardware and do not block it to latest gen of cards.

I'm wondering why they did not use it on consoles. They have 60fps performance mode. Giving the option to turn Frame Gen and bump it to 120 seems like a great idea, especially since on consoles people use gamepads. Well maybe they will add it with some update.

 

[nguyen]

modder PureDark says the DLSS implementation in Avatar is flawed LOL, it's missing depth information which can be fixed with a single toggle, I wonder how the devs don't know about that.

And yeah DLSS FrameGen mod is already done.

 

[pexxie]

I got nasty frame pacing with frame generation on. Lots of frame flickering while looking around. It's probably just my setup, but it's only when I enable FG. Monitor frequency reading does crazy acrobatics while it's on. RTX 4060 Ti. v537.42 and v546.29 drivers tested. I'll add another peanut gallery comment if I figure it out.