DLSS 4.5 wins big: 48% of gamers pick Nvidia over AMD FSR (and native) in blind gaming test

RTX 5070 vs RTX 5070 Ti — (Image credit: Future)

The choice of which GPU to buy for your PC isn’t really about just the hardware anymore — it’s also about the AI trickery to make your games look better and run smoother too. And there are two key players at the moment: Nvidia’s DLSS 4.5 and AMD FSR 4 (a core component to FSR Redstone).

But which one looks better? Well, In a blind PC gaming test conducted by ComputerBase, 48% of players chose Nvidia DLSS 4.5 over AMD FSR and even native rendering — signaling a strong lead in AI upscaling.

By the numbers

ComputerBase’s study took the total of 6,747 votes across six games — all of which are pretty well-optimized for both AMD and Nvidia GPUs. To test this, three systems were shown to gamers:

One with Nvidia DLSS 4.5 running (set to quality mode)
One with AMD FSR 4 running (set to quality mode)
One with neither — running at native resolution with Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA — more on this later)

And here are the results.

DLSS 4.5 vs AMD FSR 4 — (Image credit: ComputerBase)

What is abundantly clear here is that while AMD has made some significant steps forward with its new FSR tech, Nvidia still holds a commanding lead with DLSS 4.5 and all of its AI tech.

FSR 4 still falls for some of the classic things you see with AI upscaling like fizzling jaggedness on finer geometry, ghosting around fast-moving objects, and some shimmering around brightly-lit scenes.

But, interestingly, while there were huge gaps between DLSS 4.5 and FSR 4 in “Satisfactory” and “Horizon Forbidden West,” many users (23%) couldn’t see much of a difference between Nvidia and AMD in “Cyberpunk 2077.”

So while Team Green has a fairly large lead on average, in certain circumstances (like 4K high-fidelity environments in this particular game), that gap is narrowing.

The biggest surprise?

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT — (Image credit: Future)

The one that shocked me the most was to see DLSS 4.5 so handily beat native resolution too! But there is a logical reason for this, because the idea of “native” is almost never raw pixels.

You’ll see most games use something called Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) to smooth out the jagged edges by blending the current and previous frame together — no AI required. But in smoothing them out like this, it can often create a blurry image during movement.

Because DLSS replaces this native TAA with its own AI-trained transformer model, which uses a massive training dataset to “know” what specific objects should look like, it can produce a much sharper and stable image.

What is a little odd, though, is how AMD’s FSR 4 came in third, because surely this should land above Native + TAA. But ComputerBase did have an answer for this, saying that the results don’t show “what is perceived as the second and third best.”

The question asked was to rate what had the “best image quality,” so to say that “FSR Upscaling looks worse than native” would be wrong given the skewing of the data based on how the study was done.

Follow Tom's Guide on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds.

More from Tom's Guide

TOPICS