NVIDIA DLSS 2 has outclassed AMD FSR 2 across 26 games which shows the green team’s superior upscaling implementation.
It’s a head-to-head fight between AMD FSR 2 & NVIDIA DLSS 2 to see which upscaler is the best for gamers
In today’s PC games, gamers can utilize AMD FSR 2 and NVIDIA DLSS 2 upscaling technologies for faster performance with minimal image quality sacrifice. These upscaling technologies come in a range of modes, allowing users to set what’s best suited for them and the hardware they are using.
As of right now, there are 260 games/apps that support NVIDIA’s DLSS 2 and 110 games/apps that support FSR 2. That is definitely a really huge list of games and applications to compare the 2 said technologies however, HardwareUnboxed did a test between 26 modern AAA titles to see which is the upscaler that stands out in terms of performance and quality.
It should be noted that the staff at Wccftech did not tabulate these performance metrics and are connected to HardwareUnboxed. Any bias to any company by HardwareUnboxed in the following video does not reflect Wccftech.
In the video, HardwareUnboxed compares the performance and Quality modes of both AMD FSR 2 & NVIDIA DLSS 2 in two resolutions — 1440p and 4K. Early in the video, it is stated that combining results for all settings and resolutions add to 104 individual results. Also, Hardware Unboxed looks at image quality will be above frame rates in the results as both upscaling technologies provide almost negligible performance.
Another fact stated in the above video is how both companies’ upscalers replace DLL libraries with their proprietary files. This grants each company an unfair advantage over the other, so Hardware Unboxed assured that no DLL modifications were made in the testing to offer a more accurate result from both AMD and NVIDIA.
The scoring system from Hardware Unboxed is as follows:
- DLSS +++ (Significantly better)
- DLSS ++ (Moderately better)
- DLSS + (Slightly better)
- Tie
- FSR + (Slightly better)
- FSR ++ (Moderately better)
- FSR +++ (Significantly better)
The above scaling system allows users to see what was more favorable to AMD or NVIDIA and a median where both companies showed similar to identical results.
The chart below shows the results of testing the 26 titles, with only NVIDIA DLSS 2 showing more favorable results against AMD FSR 2. Five titles were identical in performance and quality. At the same time, twelve were slightly favorable to DLSS, another seven titles moderately flattering to DLSS 2, and two were the best for DLSS 2 over AMD’s FSR 2. AMD never shows up on the results leading over DLSS 2.
AMD FSR 2 vs NVIDIA DLSS 2 at 4K (Image Credits: HardwareUnboxed):
AMD FSR 2 vs NVIDIA DLSS 2 at 2K (Image Credits: HardwareUnboxed):
Breaking it down further, the following chart shows the testing with each game title, with the darkened areas preferential to NVIDIA’s technology, and with the lighter sections drawing away from NVIDIA, albeit slightly, but still favoring NVIDIA DLSS 2 over AMD FSR 2.
Eight titles in 4K Quality and Performance showed a tie for both companies, but NVIDIA was the clear winner in this test. So, why would a user choose AMD after these results? NVIDIA’s DLSS 2 technology is not supported on all graphics cards, unlike AMD FSR 2, which is supported on all current GPUs. Additionally, AMD FSR 2 is supported by iGPUs and cost-friendly, low-powered graphics, unlike NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs that only support the DLSS 2 upscaling technology.
The results also become more skewed as NVIDIA added Frame Generation to its newest version of the DLSS upscaler. This is only available for the company’s latest RTX 40 series graphics cards, not for older generations or AMD’s graphics cards. On the other hand, AMD will have a new version of the FSR technology, FSR 3, that will offer a similar boost to framerates as NVIDIA’s current DLSS technology and is expected to be supported with the current and previous Radeon graphics cards.
This is definitely a lot of hard work done by HardwareUnboxed to compare AMD FSR 2 against the NVIDIA DLSS 2 technology. There are new titles coming every month that support these upscalers and even the upscalers themselves receive updates within the given version which adds to better quality and higher performance. We should mention that while Intel’s XeSS was left out, we would really love to see those added in future tests though the list of games isn’t as big as NVIDIA & AMD offerings.
Source: HardwareUnboxed (YouTube); VideoCardz
