AMD FSR 2.0 vs. DLSS: 8 Generations of GeForce and Radeon GPUs Benchmarked

[Scorpus]

FSR 2.0 is AMD's second attempt at offering a broad game upscaling technology to compete with Nvidia's DLSS. In this article we'll be using the game Deathloop which supports DLSS, FSR 1.0 and FSR 2.0 to benchmark and compare several GPUs from current and previous generations.

Read the full article here.

https://www.techspot.com/review/2464-amd-fsr-2-vs-dlss-benchmark/

 

[Irata]

Thanks for the very thorough review.

Looking at the results makes me wonder if memory has something to do with the differences in FSR 2 performance.

It would be really interesting to compare a 4GB 5500 XT to the 8GB model as this should clearly show the effect memory has (or hasn‘t).

 

[dangh]

It I really awesome that AMD was able to achieve such solid quality and performance increase without having specialised units, no gpu limitations, simple implementation with saved time devs could use for general optimization, not preparing spearate modules for each software provider.
FSR and freesync shows how important is to no lock technologies behind a paywall. Everyone benefits, together with creator, if the product is easy to use, affordable, and popular.
Waiting for RT done on normal CU's.

 

[Nobina]

Hopefully, more FSR 1.0 games add FSR 2.0 support.

 

[Achaios]

Α slap in the face for the Leatherman and his Planned Obsolesence for Pascal GPUs.

What you do not mention but I will in your stead, is that the benefit from FSR 2.0 is going to be significantly more substantial for a fast overclocked GTX 1080 e.g. the Game Rock Edition considered the best iteration of the GTX 1080, and rather huge for an overclocked 1080TI.

 

[Squid Surprise]

So basically, if your card doesn't have DLSS, FSR 2.0 is really good...

This makes it a no-brainer for anyone with an older card or an AMD one...

What it isn't, is a replacement for DLSS - which will be in all Nvidia cards 2000 series and newer.

As the point of this, for AMD, is to make you purchase a new AMD card instead of a new Nvidia one... that makes it a failure.

Great for consumers - not so great for AMD... kind of wondering why they did it - but thanks!

 

[mbk34]

It might make an interesting article seeing if you can get FSR 2.0 to work on a GTX 1060 6GB card. I understand AMD doesn't recommend the 1060 but it's one of the most popular cards out there. It might also be a good way of enticing existing NVidia customers, who are sick to death of pricing and availability issues, across to AMD.

 

[Puiu]

We need more games, which should be coming soon.

 

[hahahanoobs]

It might make an interesting article seeing if you can get FSR 2.0 to work on a GTX 1060 6GB card. I understand AMD doesn't recommend the 1060 but it's one of the most popular cards out there. It might also be a good way of enticing existing NVidia customers, who are sick to death of pricing and availability issues, across to AMD.

That's odd AMD would say that when the GTX 1060 had the lower frame-time cost vs the RX 580. DF also concluded lower end GCN and Pascal cards are suitable for 1080p/1440p.

 

[Puiu]

So basically, if your card doesn't have DLSS, FSR 2.0 is really good...

This makes it a no-brainer for anyone with an older card or an AMD one...

What it isn't, is a replacement for DLSS - which will be in all Nvidia cards 2000 series and newer.

As the point of this, for AMD, is to make you purchase a new AMD card instead of a new Nvidia one... that makes it a failure.

Great for consumers - not so great for AMD... kind of wondering why they did it - but thanks!

They did it to create a standard in the industry (just like with Freesync). Nvidia can't push more and more money in the pockets of developers forever and Intel is behind schedule by a lot. This way, even if DLSS is better, FSR has a chance to become the default upscaling technique used by devs (which could also work on consoles) thus invalidating any advantage Nvidia has.

 

[JMGBJR]

It might make an interesting article seeing if you can get FSR 2.0 to work on a GTX 1060 6GB card. I understand AMD doesn't recommend the 1060 but it's one of the most popular cards out there. It might also be a good way of enticing existing NVidia customers, who are sick to death of pricing and availability issues, across to AMD.

Hopefully in a year or so, when AMD releases its Phoenix APUs, preferably a 6 core model ( si as a R5 7600G for less than $200 that won't as easily affected by the mining crap), perhaps the GTX 1060 6G will finally fall out of use. It will probably be faster because because of the faster ZEN4 arch compared to whatever cpu most GTX 1060 users have paired with their cards. It will have RT and better utilize FSR 2.0 as - it might even run Win 11.

 

[Irata]

It might make an interesting article seeing if you can get FSR 2.0 to work on a GTX 1060 6GB card. I understand AMD doesn't recommend the 1060 but it's one of the most popular cards out there. It might also be a good way of enticing existing NVidia customers, who are sick to death of pricing and availability issues, across to AMD.

Sadly, I think that won‘t happen. I would bet that many that still rock a non-RTX card will use FSR 2 but despise doing so due to some twisted logic of ‚being forced to use the inferior option by AMD‘.

 

[envirovore]

Waiting for RT done on normal CU's.

It already is.
Play Teardown.
The rendering engine itself is software raytracing, no traditional rasterization in use at all.
The caveat is that it had to be made with voxels to maintain performance.
Works on RX580's, works on gtx1xxx series GPUs, no dedicated RT compute units required.

 

[scavengerspc]

Looking forward to the future testing. I have been looking at this with Dying Light 2 (my 2080 laptop) and in my opinion DLSS looks a little better with the best quality (which needs to be activated with FSR for some reason) but I seem to be getting slightly better frame rates with FSR. With no built-in benchmark I don't know how to verify though.

 

[Tecnoworld]

Pity that my beloved 1080ti was not tested. I'm pretty sure it could be on par with 6700xt at 1440. And it's almost 5 years old.

 

[Lew Zealand]

I wonder when this tech will be able to run with an improvement on iGPUs/APUs as more of those are sold than dGPUs and are also real underpowered. But a minimum of power is still needed just to run FSR and I wonder if Xe or Radeon 680 are good enough to see a benefit right now. I assume not, but at some point in the future with FSR 3+ and better iGPUs, regular users could see a decent boost.

 

[Avro Arrow]

It I really awesome that AMD was able to achieve such solid quality and performance increase without having specialised units, no gpu limitations, simple implementation with saved time devs could use for general optimization, not preparing spearate modules for each software provider.
FSR and freesync shows how important is to no lock technologies behind a paywall. Everyone benefits, together with creator, if the product is easy to use, affordable, and popular.
Waiting for RT done on normal CU's.

ATi has always been the pro-consumer corporation that has supported open standards unlike nVidia which has always been the paragon of greed. ATi creates Mantle, AMD gives it away to anyone who wants it for free. It becomes VULKAN and is a large part of Microsoft's DirectX12. To show you what a nasty piece of trash he is, the Big Huang rejected AMD's offer to give them the source code so they could better optimise it for GeForce cards.

Someone who gives a damn about their customers would have been only too happy to do that, but that's not Jensen. No, he said that Mantle was "unimpressive" while Microsoft, the king of software companies, took one look at it, saw how great it was and used it for a large chunk of DirectX12. Jensen Huang is a narcissistic baby. I would say that I have a million times more respect for Lisa Su than Jensen Huang but a million times zero is still zero.

As for RT on normal CUs, that's what Radeons are doing now.

 

[Avro Arrow]

Great for consumers - not so great for AMD... kind of wondering why they did it - but thanks!

You're wondering why they did it? I don't know if you're joking but if you're not, it would appear that you've become awfully cynical without realising it. AMD did it because every since they bought ATi, they've been culturally taken over in the way that ATi has made them very pro-gamer and pro-consumer.

This is no different than when they made Mantle (aka VULKAN, aka DirectX12) and just gave it away to everyone. The difference is that Intel and nVidia are run by psychopaths who have no goodwill towards consumers or gamers (and have demonstrated that over and over and over again). Every time nVidia has had some new tech, they've hoarded it jealously (like SLI, PhysX, CUDA & DLSS) while AMD has always been in favour of open standards (CrossfireX, Havok, OpenCL & FSR). This is why Linux users use almost exclusively Radeon cards.

The Big Huang over at Green Goblin didn't (and still doesn't) give a rat's posterior about the ecosystem itself, just what he can get out of it. He didn't think it was important for his cards to support Linux so they didn't bother making even half-decent Linux drivers. This is why Linus Torvalds had some very specific words for nVidia and you probably know what they are.

I don't understand how someone can support that company by buying their product and their PC doesn't feel slimy to them like mine would to me. I guess that people just don't understand ethics or kindness anymore. It's definitely not a great commentary on society today.

 

[PEnnn]

It seems one has to be a hard-core nVidia drone to see that those results - and the screen shots to prove it - are not essentially identical.

The nGridia engineers must be having an exploding-brain syndrome right now.

 

[Irata]

So basically, if your card doesn't have DLSS, FSR 2.0 is really good...

This makes it a no-brainer for anyone with an older card or an AMD one...

What it isn't, is a replacement for DLSS - which will be in all Nvidia cards 2000 series and newer.

As the point of this, for AMD, is to make you purchase a new AMD card instead of a new Nvidia one... that makes it a failure.

Great for consumers - not so great for AMD... kind of wondering why they did it - but thanks!

I think FSR‘s point is that you no longer have to buy an RTX card if you want good upsampling.

Its point is not being a Radeon USP but rather eliminating one of nVidia‘s.

Either way, freedom of choice is a good thing in my book, your mileage may vary.

 

[Squid Surprise]

They did it to create a standard in the industry (just like with Freesync). Nvidia can't push more and more money in the pockets of developers forever and Intel is behind schedule by a lot. This way, even if DLSS is better, FSR has a chance to become the default upscaling technique used by devs (which could also work on consoles) thus invalidating any advantage Nvidia has.

Yes... that seems far more likely than Avro's rant...

You're wondering why they did it? I don't know if you're joking but if you're not, it would appear that you've become awfully cynical without realising it. AMD did it because every since they bought ATi, they've been culturally taken over in the way that ATi has made them very pro-gamer and pro-consumer.

This is no different than when they made Mantle (aka VULKAN, aka DirectX12) and just gave it away to everyone. The difference is that Intel and nVidia are run by psychopaths who have no goodwill towards consumers or gamers (and have demonstrated that over and over and over again). Every time nVidia has had some new tech, they've hoarded it jealously (like SLI, PhysX, CUDA & DLSS) while AMD has always been in favour of open standards (CrossfireX, Havok, OpenCL & FSR). This is why Linux users use almost exclusively Radeon cards.

The Big Huang over at Green Goblin didn't (and still doesn't) give a rat's posterior about the ecosystem itself, just what he can get out of it. He didn't think it was important for his cards to support Linux so they didn't bother making even half-decent Linux drivers. This is why Linus Torvalds had some very specific words for nVidia and you probably know what they are.

I don't understand how someone can support that company by buying their product and their PC doesn't feel slimy to them like mine would to me. I guess that people just don't understand ethics or kindness anymore. It's definitely not a great commentary on society today.

No... I think ALL companies are in this to make money... if you want to call them psychopaths, that's your prerogative... but in that case, I think almost every CEO on Earth must be a psychopath...

 

[Alfatawi Mendel]

For all intents and purposes FSR 2.0 is the equivalent of DLSS. The frame rates are within a margin of error...and image quality is not an issue because as slight as it is... it becomes unnoticeable whilst actually playing a game. Best of all it's free. The much hyped Tensor cores have suddenly become an extraneous appendage. A further benefit, is that TS won't need to mention DLSS in every review now.
Well done AMD.

 

[Puiu]

For all intents and purposes FSR 2.0 is the equivalent of DLSS. The frame rates are within a margin of error...and image quality is not an issue because as slight as it is... it becomes unnoticeable whilst actually playing a game. Best of all it's free. The much hyped Tensor cores have suddenly become an extraneous appendage. A further benefit, is that TS won't need to mention DLSS in every review now.
Well done AMD.

let's just wait and see a few more titles first

 

[b3rdm4n]

ATi has always been the pro-consumer corporation that has supported open standards unlike nVidia which has always been the paragon of greed.

The difference is that Intel and nVidia are run by psychopaths who have no goodwill towards consumers or gamers
The Big Huang over at Green Goblin didn't (and still doesn't) give a rat's posterior about the ecosystem itself, just what he can get out of it.

Yawn.

NVIDIA looks for new problems to solve using a difficult/expensive approach, which it can sell as exclusive features for a generation or two. AMD looks at the problem NVIDIA discovered, their solution, and tries to find the most frugal alternative solution.

And lets also face reality here, you can't arrive late to the party, with circa 20% market share, launch an inferior product... and then vendor lock it. Who would buy into that? Your "good guys" had no other choice, and they did it to keep people like you being a wallet to them, they want as much money from you as they can possibly get to, but playing catch up means they need to go about it different ways.

For all intents and purposes FSR 2.0 is the equivalent of DLSS. The frame rates are within a margin of error...and image quality is not an issue because as slight as it is. The much hyped Tensor cores have suddenly become an extraneous appendage.

Except it looks worse, considerably so especially with distracting shimmer and flicker, and performs worse, considerably worse too when looking at the frame time cost to run the technique, a margin of error it is not.

I know people would love for tensor cores to be useless, but this exercise has actually demonstrated the complete opposite, DLSS looks considerably better, and runs a hec of a lot better.

What will actually happen, is these two will exist in tandem for years to come, pushing each other to new heights. They certainly both have things to learn from each other.

For those of you desperately wanting big evil Nvidia to take an L and DLSS to die, well, you'll be waiting quite some time yet.

 

[Mr Majestyk]

At one point last year AMD said RDNA3 might see FSR hardware acceleration added and we could see huge gains if true. Already FSR2 works better with the newer and faster cards but hw acceleration would be an enormous benefit. If that were the case it would be great to be able to choose your rendering resolution rather than say only having say 1440p for 4K if choosing quality. 1800p hw accelerated would easily beat out 1440p software accelerated and offer higher fidelity.

I hope this feature is coming. I want to avoid Nvidia if I can for the gen. I have no reason to believe RDNA3 will be far more power efficient and if they can massively improve RT engines and get close to Lovelace I'm in. They will easily be as good if not better on rasterisation and we are expecting ~80-100% uplift there from both camps.