STALKER 2: DLSS vs. FSR vs. XeSS Comparison

[maxus24]

Stalker: Heart of Chornobyl is out now on PC, with support for NVIDIA's DLSS Super Resolution, DLAA and Frame Generation, Intel's Xe Super Sampling, UE5's Temporal Super Resolution and AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution upscaling and Frame Generation. In this review we compare the image quality and performance gains offered by these technologies.

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[shk021051]

atleast fsr is 3 gen behind

 

[Vayra86]

atleast fsr is 3 gen behind

Yeah this is like ... what? Might as well just play natively at 360p or something lol

 

[Timbaloo]

Wow, FSR fubar. No way this is typical FSR quality, someone has something messed up, and quite hard so.

 

[mb194dc]

Need better, faster video with action to see the drawbacks of upscaling. Native and just tweaking the settings actually provides a better visual experience and frames usually in real world usage.

 

[Vayra86]

Need better, faster video with action to see the drawbacks of upscaling. Native and just tweaking the settings actually provides a better visual experience and frames usually in real world usage.

To be fair, I'm just putting upscaling on the trash heap for now. It'll get there when it gets there, but you'll still need a good GPU nonetheless. Nothing has changed, we just have more varieties of AA now, of which the vast majority is uber shite. Was playing Shadow Warrior 2 the other day. No upscale. Native 3440x1440 ultra all the things; everything is flashy and all... 180 FPS minimums. It is at that moment one realizes they're being taken for a ride. I don't like being taken for a ride.

Currently we are looking at a Stalker that for all intents and purposes does NOT look next gen, but rather like a heavily upscaled OG Stalker with new and higher quality assets in there and a few new post effects. It runs in UE5. Vaseline can be added to it to barely achieve 60 FPS on everything but the top end cards at 4K. Its 2024. Hello???

The FPS alone wouldn't be the biggest issue, what's bigger here is that on top of using an off the shelf engine that saves a lot of dev time, the game's also not even well polished. So it sucks in the graphics department (let's be real here, Metro can look and run better, being years older and running on half the hardware), but that saved time apparently didn't go into solid systems either. I call this regression. Not progress. This game achieves doing nothing new or special but kills performance along the way.

 

[Redwoodz]

First of all, in my opinion the still shots look like someone hasn't adjusted the display correctly. DLSS is oversharpened and FSR has heavier blacks. Secondly, why would you be using 720P internal resolution with FSR?

 

[oxrufiioxo]

The FPS alone wouldn't be the biggest issue, what's bigger here is that on top of using an off the shelf engine that saves a lot of dev time, the game's also not even well polished. So it sucks in the graphics department (let's be real here, Metro can look and run better, being years older and running on half the hardware), but that saved time apparently didn't go into solid systems either. I call this regression. Not progress. This game achieves doing nothing new or special but kills performance along the way.

Yeah, UE5 still takes a ton of work to look good so even though it can save developers time on lighting and reflections they still need to make a effort especially on the character models and upscaling methods.

Hopefully UE5 5.5 solves some of that.

 

[Dorek]

I like to play on the DLAA mode with frame gen.

 

[oxrufiioxo]

I like to play on the DLAA mode with frame gen.

DLAA no framegen is my Jam. Although lately these UE5 games basically require DLSS quality which I still typically find better than native TAA.

 

[Legacy-ZA]

DLAA no framegen is my Jam. Although lately these UE5 games basically require DLSS quality which I still typically find better than native TAA.

Also hammers the GPU more than the CPU, so if you have an older CPU, it can remove some of the bottleneck.

Anyway, DLSS is definitely more superior than FSR, it's day night difference at this point, hopefully with AMDs new cards powered by their rumoured AI, could fix FSR for them.

 

[thepath]

So just use TSR if you don't have Nvidia GPU and DLSS if you have one

Forget about FSR and XeSS

 

[harm9963]

4K EPIC DLAA and FG are my cup of tea! graphics wise , looks dated in some areas , like the village , but overall enjoying the game .

 

[Space Lynx]

Wow, FSR fubar. No way this is typical FSR quality, someone has something messed up, and quite hard so.

I don't read all of these comparison articles, but most of them seem to say the same thing, DLSS is much better than FSR any version comparison. That seems to be consistent. I have such a large backlog though, I really don't care about anything except raster anyway. I admit, it's one of AMD's biggest weaknesses though.

 

[Dawora]

Thats why is better to buy Nvidia, superior features... it just works..

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Based on the number of issues in the base game, not sure you can derive too much from these results.

Honestly sounds like Stalker 2 needs about 6 months and a dozen patches before it's ready for primetime.

FSR is ofc worse than DLSS, but it sounds like everything is kinda wonky, even if one is better than the others.

 

[nguyen]

Playing the game @ 4K DLSS.Quality + Frame Gen, normally I would use DLSS.Balanced but software Lumen is so noisy that using lower DLSS setting would exacerbate this issue.

Hardware RT and Ray Reconstruction can't come soon enough

 

[soupinator]

FSR really doesn't look like it's functioning correctly here. I expect it to look worse, but nowhere near this bad.

 

[Dorek]

DLAA no framegen is my Jam. Although lately these UE5 games basically require DLSS quality which I still typically find better than native TAA.

I agree, i would use anything over TAA, but ill try as well without frame gen if the graphics card stays quiet haha.

 

[Trunks0]

FSR really doesn't look like it's functioning correctly here. I expect it to look worse, but nowhere near this bad.

Game is pretty janky.... so not overly surprising that the upscalers implementations are also a little janky. It is FSR 3.1... could try swapping in a newer "amd_fidelityfx_dx12.dll"... but I don't think the newer versions have made any strides that would make a difference here (think they added things to help with implementation... vs improvements to help with existing blur, disocclusion artifacts, ghosting etc)

Awesome work as always though @maxus24

 

[Super XP]

NVIDIA's DLSS Super Resolution looks like it applies a lot more sharpness, something you can do manually.

FSR really doesn't look like it's functioning correctly here. I expect it to look worse, but nowhere near this bad.

Yes agreed. It needs to be better implemented for this particular title.

 

[nvidiaenjoyer]

dlss quality looks great until you start moving, then it falls apart
better to play with dlaa on and to lower the settings a bit to hit 60+ fps

overall the game looks fantastic, but the cpu performance is extremely poor

 

[colossusrageblack]

FSR standing still looks ok, the problems become apparent when you move around. Shimmering and ghosting are everywhere. It's really distracting.

 

[theouto]

stationary FSR doesn't usually look this bad. I expected DLSS to be better, but this is a lot more than I expected.

And considering that some games do allow you to turn off TAA, maybe seeing TAA/AA off examples in the future when possible would be interesting? There are already screenshots taken at an internal native resolution, so it would be an interesting comparison (so comparing 4K DLAA or DLSSQ to 4K native, not 1440p).

 

[harm9963]

stationary FSR doesn't usually look this bad. I expected DLSS to be better, but this is a lot more than I expected.

And considering that some games do allow you to turn off TAA, maybe seeing TAA/AA off examples in the future when possible would be interesting? There are already screenshots taken at an internal native resolution, so it would be an interesting comparison (so comparing 4K DLAA or DLSSQ to 4K native, not 1440p).

I use DLAA and FG at 4k epic, have no issues with FG , or any issues at all, must be lucky , hopefully next update , the game will address most of the the issues.