The World of Upscaling: A Deep Dive into DLSS and FSR

As we delve into the world of upscaling, it's fascinating to consider that many PS5 games can now utilize both NVIDIA's DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) and AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR). This technology has been touted as a middle ground between the two, offering a balance between image quality and performance. In our testing, we've found that this is indeed the case.

One of the first games we wanted to try out was Ratchet and Clank. Despite being a PS5 game, it surprisingly doesn't exhibit any significant performance differences when using DLSS or FSR. However, it's worth noting that Intel's upscaling technology seems to be the most aggressive in this regard. We saw it fix itself after what appeared to be a brief "seizure," and it's clear that it's designed to push the limits of what's possible with upscaling.

We decided to put FSR through its paces by trying it out on The Last of Us. Interestingly, we found that it performs similarly to DLSS, even in scenes where the latter would typically struggle. When balanced between the two, DLSS drops from 1080p to 1120x632, giving us a significant performance boost. However, if we pushed FSR to its limits by dropping the resolution to Performance mode, we noticed some artifacts beginning to show.

A key aspect of upscaling is how it affects frame generation. In our testing, we found that DLSS only goes down to Performance mode in certain games, whereas FSR can be turned on for all settings. This means that if you want to push the limits of performance, you'll need to use FSR and sacrifice some image quality.

Despite this limitation, we were impressed by the overall performance of both technologies. In general, DLSS tends to offer better results than FSR in static shots, but when movement is involved, FSR can sometimes produce a slightly more nuanced look. However, the difference between the two has been largely eliminated at our testing resolutions.

One game that stood out was The Last of Us. When we dropped the resolution to 40 frames per second using DLSS, the game looked and felt almost indistinguishable from its original 1080p medium setting. However, when we turned on FSR and went even lower, the image quality began to degrade significantly. It's a great example of how upscaling can sometimes feel like a balancing act between image quality and performance.

In our final test, we set The Last of Us to its normal settings with DLSS enabled. At first, the game looked stunning, but as we continued to play, the "mush" effect became more pronounced, and input lag crept in. It's clear that upscaling can sometimes lead to this kind of degradation, especially when pushing the limits of performance.

Despite these limitations, it's clear that upscaling is here to stay. Whether or not it's a selling point for your next game will depend on the specific title and how it handles these technologies. With its aggressive approach to image quality and performance, Intel's new beta 9000 technology seems poised to shake things up in the world of gaming.

If you're interested in learning more about upscaling and its latest developments, be sure to check out our next video suggestion. Until then, thanks for watching, and we'll see you in the next article!

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin today's video I'm going to have a look at the newest in a long line of nvidia's  noob beter 9000s and funnily enough I was actually baited by this graphics card the  other day I was shopping for graphics cards and noticed some RTX 3050s selling for $220 Canadian  dollar which seemed like a great deal to me I was legitimately really excited to see that but  then I noticed that it just has 6 gigs of video memory which was not the amount I remembered the  have it so I Googled it and realized that it's not an RTX 3050 if anything it's an RTX 3040  so in today's video I'm going to see how slow this thing actually is and to What depths the  RTX name plate has plunged but first today's video is sponsored by boot dodev a great way  for even a complete Noob To Learn backend web development in both Python and go programming  languages and with boot. dev's focus on the gamification of learning not only is the process  very engaging but it also gets you to write a ton of actual code nothing like some practical  learning and for those of you that feel like you need a community for learning boot. deev  has a very active Discord Community with a bunch of people willing to help if you  ever get stuck on particular problems and there are even community events like bimonthly boss  battles where the community rallies together and gets bonus XP for every lesson they complete so  if you want to learn some valuable programming skills check out boot. Dev with the link down  below and use code do it for 25% off your first month or even first year if you choose annualbilling now I'm always excited about a new budget graphics card but this 6 gig RTX  3050 is pretty much a masterclass in how to turn something exciting into something that's a family  ruining traumatic experience this is kind of like giving your kid socks on Christmas it's outrageous  because not only does your video memory drop from 8 gigs to 6 gigs with a smaller memory bus but the  GPU in here is also cut down quite significantly it's cut down so significantly in fact that Nvidia  thought it was appropriate for them to call the GPU something different the GPU die in  the 8 gig variant of the RTX 3050 is called the ga 106 whereas in the 6 gig variant of the 3050  it's called the ga 107 yeah I mean here's a handy rule of thumb for you inidia if you feel like the  GPU die warrants a different name the graphics card warrants a different name it's not really  difficult like if they just called it the RTX 3040 it would have been a lot more exciting cuz  on the surface it's got some stuff going for it it's droing TDP for example means that it doesn't  need supplemental power so low profile versions of these gpus are much more versatile than its  more power hungry Brothers but anyway let's put my disgruntled ramblings aside and drop this graphics  card into a system to see what kind of performance we get out of it and how it compares to its bigger  brother now in terms of the system I'm testing it in I've got a ryzen 9 5900 X in there with 16 gigs  of ddr4 running at 3600 MHz so with that let's see how it performs damn I thought these gaming X  cards were like good versions of gpus but this is one step of building build quality away from just  being a scam wish graphics card oh I love the little Stoppers that keep the back plate from  overbending and they're not screwed down look at that Stellar build quality aside the RTX 3040 and  I'm going to call it that from now on cuz it's much less stupid in a vacuum performs pretty  well this is CS2 running a 1080p low settings and for an Esports title like this it's very usable I  mean look at that it's well over 300 frames per second and because of its low power draw despite  the janky cooler the temperatures are very good on the card and it's pretty quiet moving over  to Doom Eternal at 1080p High settings again a very respectable result here even if you have a  higher refresh rate display this will cut it and despite the more consistent higher load on the  GPU the temperatures didn't bad ey however with a more demanding game like cyberpunk aenp medium  settings it really starts to struggle consistently staying below 60 frames per second now considering  the that the 3040 is an RTX GPU we get access to some dlss action and interestingly in cyberpunk  When comparing dlss and Fidelity FX at the same settings not only did dlss visually look a bit  better even if it wasn't a huge difference dlss looked a bit less fuzzy but I even got  a higher frame rate which I wasn't expecting this is something I'll test in more detail  later in the video but first let's get the base performance comparison out of the way but either  way even without upscaling at 1080p the 3040 does a reasonable job at gaming although when it comes  to more demanding modern games like the last of us at 1080p medium it starts to struggle a little  the game felt all molassy but how does it compare to the graphics card which name it stole a direct  comparison to the real RTX 350 is not flattering it starts off with a reasonably gentle comparison  in Counter Strike where we're seeing about a 10ish per performance difference it is worth noting that  in Counter Strike 2 the 3040 uses proportionately quite a bit less power so there's a reasonable bit  of efficiency on show here but as the games start asking more of the graphics cards the Gap keeps  getting bigger with doom Eternal not only is the average performance quite a bit better we see a  reasonable jump in 1% lows which makes it feel a lot smoother and with cyberpunk is the first time  we see that performance difference taking the gaming experience from feeling a bit theic to  being perfectly playable so depending on the game there really is a name change worthy performance  Delta between these two graphics cards and when comparing the RTX 3040 to a similarly priced is  AMD graphics card the RX 6500 XT the comparison becomes more favorable but that card was pretty  bot cheeks when it came out only has 4 gigs of video memory and doesn't have a video encoder  so you can't screen capture footage with it oh and it also wildly soiled its diapers and doom  maternal for some reason but despite being more lethargic than its bigger brother it still isn't  the slowest RTX graphics card that achievement still lies squarely in the hands of of the laptop  RTX 2050 which is still a whole lot more rubbish than our new little RTX 3040 so now that we've  confirm this is a genuine case of stolen identity let's Circle back around and see if dlss is a  feature that makes this graphics card a decent bit more exciting or if the cyberpunk situation was afluke I thought it would be interesting to start off with some Ratchet and Clank which here looks  very weird like what's up with his face what's going on here but either way at 1080p medium  settings we're getting about 60 frames per second here now let's see what happens when  we turn on the lowest settings available for rate racing and straight off the bat we've lost half  our frame rate which very much tracks for rate tracing that's often what happens the game still  looks very weird I guess things are more bloomy and kind of bright if anything it's it's just  blinding me now next let's crank dim rate racing settings and surprisingly that's had a much less  dramatic impact on the performance and I don't know visually it looks so similar to me anyway  let's see to what extent dlss can save us here let's do balanced wait a minute dlss just fixed  all that visual weirdness if anything it made a bigger Improvement to the visuals than turning  on rate racing did I guess it's cuz we're running 1080p on a 1440p display but either way we've also  gotten more performance so win-win all round let's see what happens when we jump to Performance yeah  I don't know it doesn't look that much worse even the streamers and stuff like particle effects are  being handled decently although we're not getting that much more performance but anyway either way  let's compare it to FSR so we'll switch over to FSR 3 with performance W the quality difference is  pretty big with FSR you lose some of the particle effects like the streamers and stuff in the  upscaling process which doesn't happen with dlss and when there's a bunch of movement like around  this flag there's a lot more artifacting happening with FSR ooh that's fascinating considering that  this is a PS5 game but at least there isn't a performance difference between the two and luckily  Ratchet and Clank also has Intel's upscaling so let's give that a try whoa I mean clearly Intel  is drunk or summon because oh it just fixed itself okay that was just a bit of a seizure  but it's over now but now that it's it's woken up from its drunken stuper so Intel seems to be  like a middle ground between the two when you're looking at a static shot it looks similar to dlss  but when you start moving around everything kind of blurs in the way that it does with FSR but with  that let's try one more game to see if this is a trend now the final game I want to play  around with is the last of us because recently I figured out that it's got a pretty good dlss  implementation now here it's running at the same settings I used for the testing before so this  is 1080p medium and we're actually running at 1080p here and 40 frames per second it's it's  not doing amazingly now one of the cool things about the last of us is it show shows you what  the rendered resolution is so with balanced dlss it drops from 1080p to 1120x 632 and in terms of  performance that gives us a lot more so we've gone from about 40 to about 60 and the game feels way  better and again like despite this being what looks like quite a difficult scene to upscale I  don't think I can tell dlss is on it looks really good I wonder if it's the same for Fidelity FX it  is I I don't think I can see the difference it looks so similar which I mean that's a tie right  if it performs the same and it looks the same it's functionally the same interestingly balanced  on the two uses a slightly different resolution so next we're going to go more aggressive with  it so we're going to drop it from Balan down to Performance oh it still looks so similar to me  now in zoomed in on the screenshots it looks a bit fuzzy in performance but I still can't tell  the difference between FSR and dlss here and in game they both look and feel very good although  the cracks are starting to show with things like that fence wobbling in the distance and just some  general upscaling artifacts oh interestingly dlss only goes down to Performance in this game so if  you really want to wreck your image quality you have to go back over to FSR and then I want to  go all in so we're going to turn frame generation on as well oh it's starting to look rubbish now  and it's starting to feel pretty heavy but we've got a lot of frame rate so let's crack the normal  settings which it's super not happy about in terms of that oh the mush is coming and oh look at that  line look at that uh and aside from that there's also a decent amount of input lag oh so the only  way we can make it look worse now is by dropping the display resolution which does some wild things  to the rendered resolution okay now don't get me wrong it looks like my cat threw up this  video game on the display but considering what's happening here we've got a 1440p display and the  resolution is like 3x4 it could have been a hell of a lot worse it really isn't that bad so with  that whether or not the new beta 9000 gives you cheap access to dlss as a selling point or not  I guess depends very much on the game you're playing so with that thank you for watching  subscribe and watch another video suggestion will pop up in a second and until the next one bye-byew