Horizon Forbidden West: DLSS vs. FSR vs. XeSS Comparison

[maxus24]

Horizon Forbidden West is out now on PC, with support for NVIDIA's DLSS Super Resolution, DLAA and Frame Generation. Also supported is AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution and Intel's Xe Super Sampling. In this mini-review we compare the image quality and performance gains offered by these technologies.

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[Denver]

Since the game provides this option, could you add it at least in 4k: native without any temporal filter?

 

[Nicholas Steel]

Would be nice if you also included links to each image in the comparisons, as it's rather difficult to open the pics full-size in new tabs/download them.

 

[Xuper]

I checked 1080p image on my monitor 1440p , Both DLSS/FSR/Xess do have some shimmering on trees and ground , also 1440p/4K barely seen any shimmering.
Hope they add FSR3.1 which improves quality image.

 

[Gameslove]

Playing at 8K resolution max settings, FSR 2.2 Quality, work here great, insane image.

 

[wolf]

Predicted result is predicted, bring on FSR 3.1 to see what the rest do about it!

Testing SMAA could be worthwhile to see IQ and performance too, no AA... very little merit in that. Having said that, when DF showed it, SMAA was very flickery, so much vegetation and detail and an unstable image is an instant no to me, almost got a headache/headspin in the few seconds of footage they showed

 

[ratirt]

I see shimmering in every upscaling tech presented here. Specifically with the grass. In the first shared screen scene.

 

[Garrus]

I can't stand frame generation. You turn it on, your "frame rate" goes up 30 percent. So actually it is upscaling from 1.3/2=0.65 a 35 percent lower FPS. It is worse than leaving it off. If it actually doubled the framerate that would be ok, but it does not. Not at all. And doubling with quality DLSS is not doubling either, since you can use quality DLSS without frame generation.

 

[Luminescent]

FSR implementation is unusable, later in the game i encountered rain, dust and dense vegetation in a scene, image completely broke down to something oversharpened, pixelated.

 

[mxthunder]

Can you use DLAA without frame gen or resolution scaling turned on?

 

[wolf]

Can you use DLAA without frame gen or resolution scaling turned on?

Yes indeed. Currently the best IQ the game has to offer.

 

[redeye]

quote “…with DLSS 3 Frame Generation for a better than native image quality and FPS…”

is it live or is it Memorex? lol

 

[pbupm]

why not add hardware accelerated Xess ? seems only fair to have intel solution in the best light possible to see it go against dlss.

 

[Chrispy_]

I'm glad the FSR implementation is decent this time. It was a horrible bodge in HZD on PC.

In saying that, the machine I'm likely to play this on has an Nvidia GPU, so I guess it's less relevant to me this time around.

 

[Lindatje]

AMD FSR works great, its exact the same as dlss. Want to see FSR 3.0.

 

[Denver]

quote “…with DLSS 3 Frame Generation for a better than native image quality and FPS…”

is it live or is it Memorex? lol

I don't even pay attention to the text anymore, it feels like copy and paste. But this statement is not true, unless you have some degree of vision loss and fail to notice that all temporal filters appear blurry.

 

[wolf]

quote “…with DLSS 3 Frame Generation for a better than native image quality and FPS…”

is it live or is it Memorex? lol

When the findings are the same, why rewrite it all, just seems like wasted effort. Just change and adapt the parts that have changed. The findings appear to hold true for a vast majority of readers. Naturally they'll never be acceptable to the r/fuckTAA crew.

Saw it in person last night on a mates PC that bought it, DLAA looks phenomenal in person, and the TAA is competent which is a nice change. FSR is nicely sharp and detailed at 4k but still has breakup and fizzle on certain things. SMAA is absolutely unusably flickery and unstable at virtually all times, it's downright horrible, and doesn't appear more detailed than DLAA or even DLSS Q, at least at 4k. Didn't even try no AA after the absolute shit show that was SMAA. Hopefully this gets the FSR 3.1 update at some point.

 

[Garrus]

no anti-aliasing club represent

i play Mass Effect Legendary Edition with no AA on my 4k OLED, and holy crap it looks amazing

modern games don't look that good, TAA is one of the reasons

 

[Chrispy_]

no anti-aliasing club represent

i play Mass Effect Legendary Edition with no AA on my 4k OLED, and holy crap it looks amazing

modern games don't look that good, TAA is one of the reasons

If you have OLED you can really see how much damage TAA (and DLSS, FSR, XeSS, or any other temporal filters) are doing.

I feel like DLSS is almost acceptable on a cheap monitor with mediocre pixel response times. Even without any kind of temporal blur, the image suffers from blur when you move, so getting the benefits of upscaling, de-flickering and antialiasing from DLSS is acceptable, since the added blur isn't too much worse than what the shit monitor is providing by itself.

OLED or fast monitors with strobing backlights or BFI that can actually create a sharp image when moving just highlight how bad temporal filters are. Most reviewers disable motion blur features in games because it destroys image quality so badly that most people don't like it and don't use it, and TAA is definitely going down the same path. I don't know anyone in my group of gaming friends who likes motion blur, chromatic abberation, or excessive bloom/flare. We invest all this money into faster, better, higher-resolution hardware that can create a crisper, sharper, cleaner image - only to have a developer slap blurring and smearing back into it on purpose? No thanks, those 'features' can f*** off.

 

[wolf]

OLED or fast monitors with strobing backlights or BFI that can actually create a sharp image when moving just highlight how bad temporal filters are

Hard disagree or that at the very least it's a personal taste thing. I game on a 120hz OLED myself, and always try every AA option, and no AA where available when on my own setup.

The best of the best? 4XSSAA, but it's prohibitively expensive. No AA is like sand in my eyes, absolutely unbearable most of the time (it does depend on the art style), just as unbearable as some seem to find TAA or blur filters as some have taken to disparagingly saying.

It's extremely rare that I find DLSS (and definitely DLAA) unable to resolve as fine detailed as no AA, especially after fine tuning sharpening, but at least you get back much needed image stability.

You guys can't stand the perceived blur, we cannot stand the perceived flicker, shimmer and instability, I may as well call no AA (or SMAA / FXAA) a flicker filter if that's the going terminology.

 

[Sithaer]

It's extremely rare that I find DLSS (and definitely DLAA) unable to resolve as fine detailed as no AA, especially after fine tuning sharpening, but at least you get back much needed image stability.

You guys can't stand the perceived blur, we cannot stand the perceived flicker, shimmer and instability, I may as well call no AA (or SMAA / FXAA) a flicker filter if that's the going terminology.

Same exact reason why I use DLSS/DLAA in almost every game where its supported. 'DLAA if I have the headroom for it'
That TAA image instability/flicker is something I can notice right away and it bothers me to no end, both DLSS and DLAA fixes it for the most part while I can hardly notice the supposed loss of image quality while actually playing the game once I've tweaked my settings or in some cases switched the DLSS dll file to my prefered version if the game was shipped with a crappy one.

Imo its great to have options for personal preferences.

 

[Chrispy_]

Hard disagree or that at the very least it's a personal taste thing. I game on a 120hz OLED myself, and always try every AA option, and no AA where available when on my own setup.

The best of the best? 4XSSAA, but it's prohibitively expensive. No AA is like sand in my eyes, absolutely unbearable most of the time (it does depend on the art style), just as unbearable as some seem to find TAA or blur filters as some have taken to disparagingly saying.

It's extremely rare that I find DLSS (and definitely DLAA) unable to resolve as fine detailed as no AA, especially after fine tuning sharpening, but at least you get back much needed image stability.

You guys can't stand the perceived blur, we cannot stand the perceived flicker, shimmer and instability, I may as well call no AA (or SMAA / FXAA) a flicker filter if that's the going terminology.

There are good TAA implementations and bad, so YMMV depending on your tolerance of blur and the selection of games you're playing.

There is definitely a happy medium where TAA samples only the last frame rather than the last five or more frames. DLAA is probably the best of the temporal filters since I believe the "sharpness" setting isn't just a post-process edge-enhancement, but also affects how much temporal data is used, and less is better IMO since that gets you some of the flicker reduction without harming image clarity in motion.

 

[Garrus]

Same exact reason why I use DLSS/DLAA in almost every game where its supported. 'DLAA if I have the headroom for it'
That TAA image instability/flicker is something I can notice right away and it bothers me to no end, both DLSS and DLAA fixes it for the most part while I can hardly notice the supposed loss of image quality while actually playing the game once I've tweaked my settings or in some cases switched the DLSS dll file to my prefered version if the game was shipped with a crappy one.

Imo its great to have options for personal preferences.

You don't notice the loss of quality when you use DLAA because you are playing newer games. Try games from the Xbox 360 generation at 4k and high refresh rates and they look INCREDIBLY clear.

 

[Super XP]

How about playing games in their pure form, NATIVE without all the frame generation gimmicks by Nvidia, AMD & Intel.

 

[Chrispy_]

How about playing games in their pure form, NATIVE without all the frame generation gimmicks by Nvidia, AMD & Intel.

It's not perfect, but I have been really impressed by frame-gen in the few titles I play that support it. Provided you use it with Reflex and your end result is at least 100fps, it's a great way to get high-refresh experience without resorting to the smear and blur of upscaling.

Whilst I'm sensitive to smearing and blur, the glitches you see from generated frames tend to be specular highlights only, or sharp-edges in reflections, so they don't actually appear too often. The worst-case-scenario I've found for DLSS3.5 frame-gen is the Afterlife Bar in CP2077 where there's a lot of neon lighting for sharp, high-contrast reflections, and polished metal and glass surfaces on six sides. Even then, to trick the frame-gen to the point where it's obviously making a real hash of things, you have to be circle-strafing a mirrored surface so that the base texture is staying centred in your screen but the reflections are making both large sideways movements, but also perspective shifts that skew the reflected image. That's a very hard thing to predict and motion vectors don't apply well to that, especially when the ratyraced reflections are noisy and temporally-filtered in the first place.

For the vast majority of my gaming with frame-gen enabled, it's a set-and-forget feature that I can basically treat as free performance 99% of the time. It's not like the occasional inaccurate reflection is a deal-breaker, given that SSR and RT reflections themselves are far from perfect in the first place!