The Medium: DLSS vs. FSR Comparison

[maxus24]

Originally, The Medium was an NVIDIA-sponsored game on PC, with support for DLSS only. Recently it has been updated to also support AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution technology. In this mini-review we take a look and compare the image quality and performance offered by both solutions.

Show full review

 

[Guwapo77]

I must say, I'm really impressed with how FSR in 1440p and above looks. I honestly didn't think they would come this close to Nvidia.

 

[lowrider_05]

I would prefer FSR to DLSS @4k because even though FSR oversharpens a little, i prefer it to DLSS wich does make everything a little to soft for my liking but everyone, in the end, should use what they can and prefer.

 

[Cowboystrekk]

I actually prefer the sharpness of FSR over DLSS in this game. With a bit of sharpening in control panel things would probably even out.

 

[z1n0x]

AMD should include FSR in the driver suite, there are already some programs that can inject it. Sure, game integration is better, but having it as an option won't hurt.

 

[napata]

I would prefer FSR to DLSS @4k because even though FSR oversharpens a little, i prefer it to DLSS wich does make everything a little to soft for my liking but everyone, in the end, should use what they can and prefer.

You know you can just oversharpen the crap out DLSS too, right? Native here looks softer than DLSS Q because DLSS also applies some sharpening, just not nearly as much as FSR. You always have the option to add aditional sharpening though, either through an ingame slider or through your drivers. Everyone is allowed their opinion but I always find it weird how people prefer oversharpened images. I think it looks awful and destroys image quality. It reminds me of people who turn their contrast to 11 with crushed blacks to make the colors "pop" even if it's super inaccurate.

The article mentions that the FidelityFX sharpening slider gets disabled in FSR but not in DLSS and wonders if it's a bug but it's obviously intended because FSR automatically applies this filter and you aren't meant to disable it if you use FSR.

 

[Pilgrim]

"The game does support the FidelityFX sharpening slider, but for some weird reason, this slider disappears when FSR is enabled"

There's no "Weird reason" behind it. It's clearly mentioned on the FSR developers guide that other sharpening filters such as CAS must be disabled if FSR is enabled (Because FSR has its own highly optimized sharpening pass).

AMD should include FSR in the driver suite, there are already some programs that can inject it. Sure, game integration is better, but having it as an option won't hurt.

FSR should only be applied to the game's initial framebuffer before the UI elements are rendered on top of it (also any other effects such as film grain, motion blur etc should be added after the FSR pass) this is why it's pointless to add FSR to the graphics driver.

 

[Athlonite]

Yeah I see no point in either DLSS or FSR both do basically the same thing which is tantamount to lowering your ingame settings to medium or high instead of running at Ultra you may aswell just lower some of your IQ settings and be done with it and run native whatever your resolution is, stupid stuff like film grain and motion blur (for anything other than a racing type game) in particular can be fps sucks

 

[Hawkster222]

Can someone tell me why the bottom window ( below the balcony on the left) has white lines over it on DLSS and not on FSR ?

Or is it just a anomaly ?

 

[VulkanBros]

So, if you look at the video - both DLSS and FSR is running on a RTX 3080.
Would FSR perform better on an AMD GPU?

 

[Ferrum Master]

Can someone tell me why the bottom window ( below the balcony on the left) has white lines over it on DLSS and not on FSR ?

Or is it just a anomaly ?

Imho that is Rain.

 

[Athlonite]

Can someone tell me why the bottom window ( below the balcony on the left) has white lines over it on DLSS and not on FSR ?

Or is it just a anomaly ?

if you look at the native pic side you'll notice the marks are on the wall (watermarking) when you go to the FSR side it seems to have extended those marks to where they should not be so it's an anomaly

 

[Super XP]

The picture quality is subjective. The Native looks better most of the time based on what I've seen.
The DLSS gives the added higher FPS though. In the end, 80-90 FPS vs. 100-110 FPS, most people won't even see this difference.

 

[Bomby569]

If you zoom in DLSS always looks better, but let's be honest people don't even notice small details let alone zooming in unless you're playing some sniper game. I have a Nvidia card and love DLSS and RTX but FRS is awesome.

 

[Oberon]

Yeah I see no point in either DLSS or FSR both do basically the same thing which is tantamount to lowering your ingame settings to medium or high instead of running at Ultra you may aswell just lower some of your IQ settings and be done with it and run native whatever your resolution is, stupid stuff like film grain and motion blur (for anything other than a racing type game) in particular can be fps sucks

This isn't true in general. Go check out Hardware Canucks' FSR review, where they compare FSR in Godfall to native resolution rendering that achieves the same framerate. The resulting image quality isn't even close.

It's more accurate to say that all DLSS and FSR are doing is lowering the render resolution (because that's actually what they do), but they also improve image quality relative to those lower resolutions for a very small performance penalty compared to just running at the lower resolution.

So, if you look at the video - both DLSS and FSR is running on a RTX 3080.
Would FSR perform better on an AMD GPU?

It's not really an AMD vs NVIDIA thing. It's just (open source) shader code, so it's really down to how well each architecture executes that code. Older architectures from both companies tend to show smaller performance improvements, but AMD and NVIDIA are pretty well-matched in general. This is pretty typical of features AMD releases through their GPUOpen project, since it's not a black box like GameWorks from NVIDIA.

 

[watzupken]

In my experience, it may not be sufficient to look at still images to determine for sure which of the 2 is better. I've not been able to try out FSR, but on DLSS, there are clearly issues when there are movements. Control being one of the best titles to showcase DLSS don't always look very good because I've noticed ghosting and shimmering when the characters are moving with DLSS enabled.

 

[Ravenas]

Thank you for the comparison. It would be nice to see a chart listing average FPS for each resolution, DLSS, and FSR. What was the test system? Was resizable bar enabled?

 

[stanleyipkiss]

At 4K, FSR looks better than DLS (at ultra / max quality settings). That is amazing.

 

[elghinnarisa]

I still prefer FSR in almost every case that is not ultra DLSS. Simply because I hate blur, if i wanted to play games with blur in them I would rub my breakfast bacon over my glasses and wham, free blur in every game, also in reality!

 

[nguyen]

I still prefer FSR in almost every case that is not ultra DLSS. Simply because I hate blur, if i wanted to play games with blur in them I would rub my breakfast bacon over my glasses and wham, free blur in every game, also in reality!

Well you can use the Sharpen+ filter in GFE overlay, it make lower DLSS mode like Performance look very much like 4K Native.

I purposefully oversharpened the DLSS Performance side that cause people to to think it's 4K Native LMAO

As for FSR, it's always oversharpened in every game that I have seen, look like cavas painting or spreading vaseline all over the screen.

 

[elghinnarisa]

Well you can use the Sharpen+ filter in GFE overlay, it make lower DLSS mode like Performance look very much like 4K Native.

I purposefully oversharpened the DLSS Performance side that cause people to to think it's 4K Native LMAO

I do not like sharpening filters, it makes everything look like shitty instagram posts. Though it is better than everything being a blur.
However, sharpening can never "unblur" a image, this ain't a CSI show, so it will never fix the original problem, that its blurry. It might only, at best, slightly alleviate it.

Though I guess people like sharpened images in general these days, seeing as how popular it is.

 

[nguyen]

I do not like sharpening filters, it makes everything look like shitty instagram posts. Though it is better than everything being a blur.
However, sharpening can never "unblur" a image, this ain't a CSI show, so it will never fix the original problem, that its blurry. It might only, at best, slightly alleviate it.

Though I guess people like sharpened images in general these days, seeing as how popular it is.

The sharpening filter is adjustable, you can choose the right balance for yourself. DLSS basically does image enhancing that you see in CSI show since it uses AI to fill in the missing details.

 

[maxus24]

What was the test system? Was resizable bar enabled?

Intel Core i7-10700F CPU, 16gb RAM, Gigabyte RTX 3080 Gaming OC.
ReBAR was disabled.

 

[elghinnarisa]

The sharpening filter is adjustable, you can choose the right balance for yourself. DLSS basically does image enhancing that you see in CSI show since it uses AI.

I am aware of how it works, I was speaking about sharpening filters are not CSI reconstructive algorithms, in this case. So it will never unblur a blurry image. It will just be "more or less instagram filter on your game?" slider. Which I do not like, no. And no amount of sharpening is going to fix a blurry image. Once blurry, it will always be blurry in this case.

 

[Krzych]

FSR has tons of aliasing and shimmering, this is just a basic upscaler with sharpening, barely any better than standard Resolution Scale setting, if at all, while DLSS not only resolves a lot of things better than native resolution, but also has the least amount of aliasing of any AA technology to date, maybe save for some instances of MSAA+SGSSAA in older games with less complexity, only the difference is that it can double the performance while doing that instead of cutting it in half. Sure it has some problems in motion, but that is hardly an argument in a world where almost all games are using blurry TAA as the only AA option and basically are one huge temporal artifact themselves. AMD really played a very cheap trick with FSR and it is sad to see the sheer amount of people buying that.