Image Quality Enhanced: DLSS 3.7 vs XeSS 1.3 vs FSR 2 - ML Upscaling Just Got Better 

Pretty impressed with XeSS. It has come along way in a short amount of time. Hope FSR 3.1 is good as well.

FSR 3.1 is way overdue, and DLSS just keeps getting better which is great to see.

Its crazy how fast intel is catching up on the software side. Hopefully their hardware will start matching that.

One of the things I love about DLSS is being able to swap in new DLLs, tweak the presets, and use tweaks to switch from DLSS to DLAA for games that don't need more FPS.

I've been experimenting with XeSS 1.3 and it's very close to DLSS now, will be a huge win for people with older GPUs along with FSR 3.1 frame generation

Amd never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity😂

The Clouds in Avatar are not a problem with DLSS itself, but with the Implementation. PureDark's DLSS 3 mod for Avatar fixes that issue completely. If I remember correctly, the developers have not passed the depth buffer correctly to DLSS and that was a relatively easy fix from PureDark's side.

FSR 3.1 (or any improvement) rollout has been moving at a snails pace, AMD needs to get their stuff together

As a PC user I'm happy all fronts of upscalling are getting better and excited to see FSR 3.1 even if I'm mostly a DLSS user, and as an console user I'm praying that FSR 3.1 drops soon and that studios update their FSR2 games to FSR3 please (maybe PSSR and the probable Sony upscalling API helps with this?).

Please do more of these upscaling comparisons with different versions

This is my favorite category of DF videos, excellent work as always Alex

Hi Alex, great video!. Do you think developers should skip FSR2 entirely and rely on XeSS DP4a for compatibility? Does XeSS DP4a work on consoles?

Can't wait to see what PSSR is capable of

XeSS has really come a long way quickly. I'd now take even the DP4a gladly. Sad that we didn't see framerate comparisons in the videos!

Thank you so much for this comparison, a lot of info to digest... I had no idea we can use different models with DLSS with the same .dll.

Thank you for demonstrating how to tweak the preset letter

Next on board, FSR 3.1 and PRSS. Amazing work Alex!!!

I'd love for more of a focus on the anti aliasing modes, and with the popularity of resolution sliders that go above 100%, supersampling modes would be awesome too. This push for upscalers has finally brought improvements to terrible TAA technology. It's just a shame it's rarely given a high quality input.

Hey, can you make a video about lossless scaling ? Both upscaling and frame gen component.

Great job! Thanks for the in depth explanation. Have you tested this with Laptop GPUs?

I really appreciate the XeSS DP4a vs XMX path comparison I feel like there aren't any other videos comparing them

AMD’s stubbornness in dedicating silicon to ML and RT is going to cost them in the long run.

wondering just how DLSS Q compares to all of those modes present in the video. Does it help eliminating those moire artefacts compared to DLSS B?

Incredible amount of work in this video. Excellent 👌

The reason you pay additional when buying RTX Cards is the Tensor Cores and it's worth it.

Add in native resolution during comparison from time to time please. Thanks for this great video

Great comparison and insight, I'll try the upgraded Xess in HFW soon. If you are looking for tricky scenes to compare, I noticed in HFW, the Vantage Point holograms loose a lot of details that visualized the difference in quality well.

Interesting work. Great video.

Really interested how PSSR compares to all 3 of them. It's an exciting time in gaming graphics these days!

It's really impressive how XeSS has improved in a very short time.

I'm most curious about improvements at the extremes--Ultra Performance modes. That's where there's the most room for improvement.

The jittering is gone in the 1.3 blur, but take a look the tree edge and tell me that isn't much worse. It sharpened the blur and now the image has sharp pixel stairs instead of the smooth gradient blur.

I'm using dlss 3.7 at under 1080p base res and it still looks amazing on my 4K TV.. it's really ridiculous. It still doesn't replace true performance and never will, or excuse bad optimization, but it's really ludicrous how well it works.

I'm excited for PSSR comparisons for when PS5 Pro comes out.

Another excellent comparison! What games will natively support DLSS 3.7?

Alex, where would you put TSR in the hierarchy?

Are You going to check out Lossless Scaling frame generation?

In terms of IQ: DLSS >> XESS >>>>>>>>> FSR.

I have a a770 in my second pc and so far it’s been a great card. Minus couple drivers issues like 8 months ago the drivers been fine since and has played every game fine that I have tried

Ok, so just so I am understanding: DLSS 3.00 and later is solely an updated version of their DLSS Super Resolution algorithm, plus frame gen and ray reconstruction, yes? Would we see any benefit in other games if we update our older DLSS nvngx files to a later version, even if for games that don't support Frame Gen/RayT and on older GPUs? Example I updated the DLSS file in EscapeFromTarkov to 3.7 but reddit said that the newest .dll file is still running DLSS 2.0. Guess I'm confused on what the nvngx versions mean

Idk if it's doable (4 screens) but adding Native image when comparing all 3 upscalers would have been nice to see how the image is supposed to look like in a "perfect" scenario

Intel's doing amazing work with their software. Congrats to their team.

What a proper video! Quality in all aspects

Thank you DF!

That Halo soundtrack really is a vibe.

It's a niche problem, but for me as a 3080 12GB owner, the best part about DLSS is DLAA and it's sadly not available most of the time.

13:56 How are you gettting these #1 and #2 categories? I don't have them on the same version of Nvidia Profile Inspector

Ah great video Alex, but to soon, it should be compared when FSR 3.1 arrives

Wouldn't you need to remake this whole video once FSR3.1 comes out? Considering the visual improvements that brings from the few screens we've seen it would be notable to consider (not as much though considering FSR3.1 unbinds the Frame Generation from the Upscaling so you could use FSR-FG with XeSS 1.3 on a Intel or AMD GPU theoretically)

Love the Halo music at the beginning

I will never get tired of Alex's sign-off...

Love your videos!

Does anyone else hear the Halo music in the background?!?!?

FSR is like someone coming to your house and tweaking the settings on your TV and saying it's 8k.

I remember herbs in the briefcase had terrible fizzle in RE4 with FSR2

You guys should consider using a memory editing tool to modify the internal resolutions directly.

Damn first five min? Hell yeah

Xess is getting there. Dlss should improve fast if it wants to remain the best upscaling method

the original XeSS release had 5 settings but just two models. It would use bilinear upscaling (and downscaling) to the actual model input and then get the target resolution output. Intel hasn't really been transparent with what is really happening. And they never made it open source as promised. So I started to do some research myself. And the biggest indicator for file size. This lead me to guess that yes, for 1.3 it's more than two models. The sharpness debate is a difficult one. The XeSS SDK allows 3 sliders(wiggle distance, sharpness, filter) for the game developer to tune and apply to the named profiles (would be great if we get that as a user perhaps). You can read about it in the PDF document in the repository or even download and try the demo project. It has all the sliders available to you. And the swapping dll problem just keeps the previous settings. So it might not be tuned for the changed base resolution. So I believe this requires a follow-up video with an official 1.3 update/title... Or comparisons in the demo app. The trails in the clouds seems like a bug worth reporting to me. Clouds are likely to be their own render pass, and particles too. Since clouds use a buffer of the previous timestep, it seems to be affected be overwritten(it loses it's timestep, and therefore the hiszory isn't spatially consistent). clouds are expensive if ray marched, and therefore might be run at a buffer with reduced resolution. It could be an issue where that reduced resolution is wrongly calculated. would be interested to go frame by frame through the pipeline and see where data is ruined. It would have been great to get a native res/ground truth with MSAA(or similar) comparison for at least a few examples. Perhaps even give a no AA base resolution example, to show what the model input is and what they have to work with (minus wiggle and vectors). That is additional capturing, but it's easier than swapping dlls or cards. ExtraSS has a video in their supplemental materials from the siggraph talk. and that will be exciting. As it does resolution and temporal extrapolation with guidance (=meaning geometry pass without shaders). So it might be a generation a head. Can't wait for that video.

Great work!

I want to watch, but at the same time I don't want to know how far behind FSR is.

DLSS, DLAA, frame gen, RT. Yes Nvidia GPUs are pretty expensive but these features unfortunately will keep me in their eco systems

More curious to see how these techniques compare in low resolution situations to get an idea of how they impact current and future handhelds like the steam deck.

I just tried the 3.7 Dlls with Cyberpunk 2077 Path Tracing, DLSS quality mode, Frame generation, Ray reconstruction and it's cleared up the trails on objects, a lot better.

Cool how amd invented per object motion fizzle

I never knew DLSS had different presets

I am surprised you didn't mention the difference in colour grading between XeSS versions

Internal resolutions not just one resolution when I showed em to down sample texture shader maps and memory tiles used for compute space that multi at one is the only way to completely do one thing properly in simulation that is

XESS 1.3 is amazing and lifted HFW to new hights on my aging GTX 1660 Ti MaxQ, when the replacement DLL became available. I am still immensely impressed though about what FSR 2.2 is managing in ultra performance (upscaling 360p to 1080p) WITHOUT ANY AI whatsoever. Sure it looks pretty unstable in motion but when coming to rest it produces a stable image, which looks like native 1080p (based on 360p!) with no direct comparison ... without AI! At launch it was the best option for me to play the game as XESS' 1.2 PERFORMANCE was not only similarly unstable, but also performed a lot worse AND looked much more blurry on top of that than FSR 2.2 ULTRA PERFORMANCE ... again: without AI! 🤯 That seemed extremely impressive to me and deserves a mention IMO 😊

Hopefully dlss 3.7 finally fixes the God awful smearing in cyberpunk 2077 with Ray reconstruction enabled.

Just tried DLSS 3.7 (E) in Diablo4 works wonders with new raytracing features and framegen works properly now which was a surprise.

Alex, one Question that is bothering me for quite some time now: Why do upscalers on the PC Rarely offer "Auto"-Modes? Meaning you set you Graphic Levels, FPS Target and resolution, and DLSS will just dynamically adjust your resolution to hit the target? In Advanced Configs a resolution scale setting (lowest / Max res) would be nice, but auto alone would be great. The Consoles do it forever now, why is that so hard to implement on the PC? Cyberpunk does it and Hogwarts Legacy (I think) but that's kinda it.... so many Console games do it but in the same game on the PC I have to make the decision on what fixed Resolution I have to play in. I hate having to go down to "Balanced" in many games so the game can deal with it in hectic situations..... but when the stress is over it'd be nice if it could up the res again.

I have to give HUGE props to Intel for not only pretty much surpassing AMD with their XeSS, but by getting closer to DLSS than anyone else ever has. That's insanely impressive considering that XeSS like under 2 years old. That amount of improvement in that amount of time is honestly kind of baffling to me.

Huh, I thought modded implementations of XeSS 3 kept the same resolution tables as XeSS 1.2, but that's interesting to see that's not the case (as some other channels may have reported)! I have been using it in a few games (mostly Cyberpunk), but those also have dynamic resolution scaling options that I've been using as well so I'm guessing that hasn't been a factor to me as I'm just hitting that 60fps target. I love, love LOVE that XeSS has the DPA4 path and it's now superior to FSR2.2. It's great to see even my 6700xt get access to machine learning upscaling in some games, hopefully more titles will have it in the future. Really wish it would be added to Alan Wake 2 for example (or at least FSR3.1 when that comes out). Hopefully in the future more games will also have just a resolution slider as well. Was pretty nice in Tekken 8 to just be able to slider TSR from 50-100, although I wouldn't mind going as low as 720p on a 4k monitor just for giggles. It usually looks horrendous with FSR2, but more options are always better.

I just need to know that I'm spoiled for choice by the end of the year between DLSS 3, FSR 3.1 and XeSS 1.3 for upscaling, anti-aliasing and super-resolution options!

OMG ALEEEX!!! IT'S MY FAVOURITE SONGS FROM HALO ON THE BACKGROUND!! LEGENDARY VIDEO!!!

Just wanted to point out that below 24 inches, DLSS even on balance in most games looks to be about the same as Native quality, FSR is very noticeable to me even on my 16 inch laptop.

FSR 2 is gerbage...

16:43 Slight blurriness? Seriously that's VERY blurry. The belt buckle is all but completely blurred to the point it can't be seen!

Not the best with understanding these technologies but I have a 3080 ti which I believe is stuck at DLSS 2. Will it then get to a point where it is worth swapping over from DLSS to XESS for better results long term? Always interested to learn from others so any info would be appreciated.

Something I wish you would address because a lot of people don't seem to understand it is that the reduction in input (pre-scaling) render resolution absolutely does reduce distant fidelity, even with DLSS, and even on "Ultra Quality". For open world games, this makes upscaling much less attractive as distant objects and areas with long view distance become frustratingly blurry much sooner than with native rendering.

Man, this open source upscaler from AMD sure is being useful in allowing us to update to improved versions of FSR as they come out. It helps it stand out very clearly against the closed source upscalers from Intel and Nvidia which prevent us from doing such things. Wait... it's the other way around? But... but everyone told me that open source was better... Well at least AMD is consistently updating their upscaler to keep it competitive against other upsca- wait, they're not doing that either? Oh come on!

thank you guys, but it would have been interesting to see the comparison with rendering without any scale technology just for a complete comparison.

Can we have a dedicated video on fast pacing games like COD and which preset to use? If possible also know whether to update DLL.

Fsr is absolute garbage.

I just loved Intel XESS kick AMD FSR ❤❤❤

Alex have you tried Cyberpunk with the newest DLSS .DLL's Ray Reconstruction ? I think it makes an immediately noticeable difference in Ray Tracing Quality Clarity. I play the game at about 50fps with DLSS Balanced, 1440p output resolution in the 3.7 with my 4070ti. Path Tracing and all settings except volumetrics on ultra. I sadly don't 't have a monitor to take advantage of FrameGen yet. But might play the game with that on streaming it to a future steamdeck oled since it provides about a 88 average framerate.

Great analysis, but I would have added a framerate comparison between all of the different upscalers. The DP4A path tends to have better image quality than FSR, but worse performance. I'd have liked to see a comparison between them to see if Intel has improved the performance on the DP4A pathway.

Crazy how amd fanbois will defend FSR to their graves when it really is sooooo bad compared to DLSS and Xess

This is one of the reasons i don't buy AMD anymore. Even Intel caught up and has better scaling while it's their first GPU. I had so many issues with AMD and FSR. Also driver time-out's and other horrible AMD stuff like extreme power consumption at IDLE with 2 screens at 165hz. They claimed it to be fixed but it's a straight lie. As i have a power meter at the wall and i measure stuff like that to me AMD is the brand to avoid.

Any way to replace dlss or fsr with xess on a nvidia card? Any way my CPU could use xess frame generation in conjunction the GPU?

where can i find how to use this NV profile inspector

Slightly disappointed DLSS 3.7 was such a small leap forward. I hope we aren’t approaching the point smartphones have reached - where there is not much to improve so updates become small and incremental like 3.7 was. I suppose something like DLSS 4 will need a major launch of a game sporting some fancy new rendering tech. I hope DLSS 4 focuses on improving a wider selection of games rather than making a select few look incredible.

With FSR 3.1 just around the corner, why not wait for that to release and then have the comparison? Just like beating a dead horse at this point.

Kinda weird that Ray Reconstruction was not included in the DLSS 3.7 update for Unreal and Unity Plugins. I’m checking the page almost every week and the (coming soon) is a bit frustrating given it’s written there since November 23

Why not use them all in max quality to show the best upscaling between them all so we can see what is better.

My prediction. Upscaling will go the way of gsync and freesync. They will all improve at varying rates and speeds but eventually (years down the line) the differences will become "academic" and people won't care. The real battleground will be the techniques (like Ray Tracing) that Upscaling makes possible.

is there a way to use dlss 3.7 in the witcher 3 net gen mod?

True, time marches on. But, for whom the bell tolls?

AMD: "We might offer the worst solution, but at least everyone can get the worst solution equally."