NVIDIA DLSS 2 outperformed AMD FSR 2 in 26 games, demonstrating the superior implementation of Green Team expansion.
It’s a head-to-head battle between AMD FSR 2 and NVIDIA DLSS 2 to see who is better for gamers.
In today’s PC games, gamers can use AMD FSR 2 and NVIDIA DLSS 2 upscaling technologies to get faster performance with minimal image quality sacrifice. These measurement technologies are available in a range of modes, allowing users to select what works best for them and the devices they are using.
There are now 260 games/apps that support NVIDIA’s DLSS 2 and 110 games/apps that support FSR 2. It’s definitely a really huge list of games and apps to compare the two mentioned technologies with, however, HardwareUnboxed did a test among 26 recent AAA titles to see which upgrader stands out in terms of performance and quality.
It should be noted that Wccftech employees did not collect these performance metrics and are logged into HardwareUnboxed. Any bias towards a company by HardwareUnboxed in the following video does not reflect Wccftech.
In the video, HardwareUnboxed compares performance and quality modes for AMD FSR 2 and NVIDIA DLSS 2 at 1440p and 4K. At the start of the video, it says the combined results for all settings and resolutions add up to 104 individual results. In addition, Hardware Unboxed considers image quality to be higher than frame rates in results, with both upgrade technologies providing almost negligible performance.
Another fact shown in the video above is how both companies replace the DLLs with their own proprietary files. This gives each company an unfair advantage over the other, so Hardware Unboxed ensured no DLL changes were made during testing to deliver a more accurate result than AMD and NVIDIA.
The classification system for unpackaged devices is as follows:
- DLSS++ (significantly better)
- DLSS++ (relatively better)
- DLSS+ (slightly better)
- Necktie
- FSR+ (slightly better)
- FSR++ (relatively better)
- FSR +++ (significantly better)
The above benchmarking system allows users to see which is more suitable for AMD or NVIDIA and the medium as the two companies showed similar results.
The graph below shows the test results for all 26 titles, with only NVIDIA DLSS 2 showing better results compared to AMD FSR 2. Five titles were identical in performance and quality. At the same time, twelve titles were somewhat more flattering for DLSS, another seven were somewhat more flattering for DLSS 2, and two were better for DLSS 2 than AMD’s FSR 2. AMD never appears at the top of DLSS 2 scores.
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 dark areas favoring NVIDIA technology, with the lighter sections departing from NVIDIA, albeit slightly, but still favoring NVIDIA DLSS 2 over AMD FSR 2.
Eight titles with 4K quality and performance showed a tie for both companies, but NVIDIA was the big 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 low-power iGPUs and budget graphics, unlike NVIDIA’s RTX GPUs which only support DLSS 2 upgrade technology.
The results got even more skewed when NVIDIA added the Frame Generation to its latest DLSS upscaler. This is only available for the company’s latest RTX 40 graphics cards, not older generations or AMD graphics cards. On the other hand, AMD will have a new version of its FSR technology, FSR 3, which will deliver a similar increase in frame rates as NVIDIA’s current DLSS technology and should be supported by current and earlier Radeon graphics cards.
There sure is a lot of hard work that HardwareUnboxed has done to calibrate AMD FSR 2 against NVIDIA DLSS 2 technology. Every month new titles support these upgrades and even the upgraders themselves get updates on the given version, improving quality and performance. We have to mention that despite the omission of XeSS from Intel, we’d really like to see them added in future tests, although the list of games isn’t as long as NVIDIA and AMD’s offerings.
Source: Unboxed (Youtube); video card