In an era where both the blue and red teams are focusing on upscaling technology to improve the quality and quantity of frames, finding the winner between FSR 4 and DLSS 4 is very important.
For many gamers, smooth gaming at 4K resolution is still a dream. Even with the help of modern frame generation technologies and the latest graphics cards, we still have difficulty achieving smooth gaming performance at the maximum level. However, it must be noted that with the advancements in upscaling and frame gen technology, 4k 60FPS is no longer too far away. In this article, we will find out between FSR4 and DLSS4, which technology brings better results at 4K resolution.
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Các công nghệ cao cấp thường mang lại những kết quả rất khác nhau ở các độ phân giải phổ biến là 1080p, 1440p và 4K. Có thể bạn sẽ nghĩ rằng ở các độ phân giải cao thì kết quả nhận được sẽ rẻ hơn, nhưng thực sự không phải vậy. Khi bạn chơi game ở độ phân giải cao hơn thì AI sẽ được cung cấp nhiều dữ liệu hơn và thường sẽ mang lại kết quả tốt hơn! Điều này đã được chứng minh qua nhiều thử nghiệm với FSR 3.1, khi nó cung cấp hình ảnh chất lượng cao hơn nhiều khi chạy trò chơi ở 4K và chứng minh khi giảm xuống 1080p.
Why should we consider FSR 4 vs DLSS 4 at 4K? Upscaling technologies often produce very different results at common resolutions such as 1080p, 1440p, and 4K. You might think that the results would be worse at higher resolutions, but that’s not the case. When you play games at higher resolutions, the AI is fed more data, and often produces better results! This has been proven in many tests with FSR 3.1, where it produces much better image quality when the game is running at 4K, and much worse when downscaled to 1080p.In this article, tests with FSR 4 were performed on the RX 9070XT graphics card, while DLSS 4 ran on the RTX 5090 card. Motion blur, film grain, vignette, chromatic aberration effects in all games were disabled because gamers usually don’t like them.
FSR 4 vs DLSS 4: Image Quality
Now that we’ve established that FSR 4 is indeed superior to FSR 3.1, let’s start comparing it to NVIDIA’s DLSS 4. Both technologies are capable of eliminating the blurring that often occurs when TAA is enabled, but FSR 4 is worse than DLSS 4 at 4K, though it’s still better than the previous DLSS 3.DLSS 4 is surprisingly good at preserving the texture of objects. FSR 4 isn’t quite there yet, but it often matches or beats DLSS 3 for detail in both Quality and Performance modes.Even if it doesn’t quite match DLSS 4, FSR 4 still delivers great clarity and sharpness when gaming at 4K. If you have a 4K monitor and need a graphics card that can produce detailed images, the RX 9070 XT and FSR 4 can definitely meet that demand, as it overcomes the blurring issues that were common with AMD’s previous upscaling technology.
FSR 4 vs DLSS 4: Image Stabilization
In terms of image stabilization, FSR 4 performs better at 4K than at 1440p. Testing showed that FSR 4 was sometimes less stable than DLSS 3 at 1440p, and sometimes Balance mode provided more stability than Quality mode. At 4K, they performed exactly as expected.
In terms of image stabilization, FSR 4 was generally on par with DLSS 3 when both were in Quality mode. Some image artifacts such as jagged edges on bricks in The Last of Us were completely eliminated at 4K with FSR 4, resulting in a much clearer image. It also rendered complex shapes such as chain-link fences well. Around moving characters in third-person games or near mesh fences, FSR 4 suffers from significantly less jagged edges and graininess.Overall, DLSS 4 still delivers the highest quality and most stable image, but the fact that FSR 4’s Performance mode is better than DLSS 3 is a notable improvement. Depending on the game, you can use Balance or even Performance mode with FSR 4 and still get a great image, something that is impossible on FSR 3.
The main drawback of FSR 4’s Balance and Performance modes is the loss of fine detail, as these modes blur or remove subtle textures to maintain stability. DLSS 4, on the other hand, can maintain both stability and fine detail in performance-first modes. FSR 4 still does a pretty good job of reproducing fine detail at 4K, but for the clearest image, you’ll want to use higher quality modes.
FSR 4 vs DLSS 4: Is AMD’s or NVIDIA’s AI better at 4K?
Pay attention to the blue holograms.
One of the biggest improvements FSR 4 brings over FSR 3 is the ability to display transparent objects, which can clearly display hologram projections or fire effects instead of turning them into a mess like in the previous versions. Smoke, particle and rain effects also display well at this resolution. For example, the snow in Horizon Zero Dawn in FSR4’s Performance mode looks much better than with DLSS 3 or FSR 3.1.
FSR 4 vs DLSS 4: Framerates
To ensure a fair comparison of framerates, this test was performed with the RX 9700XT and RTX 5070 Ti cards – two cards with similar performance. Four upscaling technologies were used for the test: DLSS 3, DLSS 4, FSR 3.1 and FSR 4. The frame rates they deliver in 4 games at 4K resolution, Ultra image quality compared to when TAA is enabled in the game are recorded in the following chart:
FSR 4 vs DLSS 4: Is AMD or NVIDIA’s AI technology better at 4K resolution?
Comparing the performance of FSR 3.1, FSR 4, DLSS 3 and DLSS 4
On the RX 9070 XT graphics card, FSR 4 has a 35% higher performance than FSR 3.1, while the RTX 5070 Ti running DLSS 4 has a 31% improvement over DLSS 3. Thus, we can see that both new upscaling technologies bring a significant advantage in terms of frame rates compared to the old version. Combined with the strong improvement in graphics quality, we can conclude that using the new upscaling technology is definitely more beneficial.
Conclusion on FSR 4 and DLSS 4
Despite all the technological improvements that AMD has achieved with FSR 4, there is still one extremely important factor that the company has not been able to catch up with NVIDIA’s DLSS 4: the list of supported games. DLSS is supported in a huge number of games, and NVIDIA is constantly releasing new driver versions that help games that have not been updated by the developer to support DLSS 4 to run this technology.
Meanwhile, the list of FSR 4 games is still very short, currently only 30 games and “75 more by 2025”. For comparison, NVIDIA launched DLSS 4 with 75 supported games from day one, and has been continuously added over the past few months. Furthermore, the fact that AMD only allows updating FSR 3.1 to FSR 4 if the game is whitelisted in the driver makes the update process very slow.
FSR 4 vs DLSS 4: Is AMD’s AI technology or NVIDIA’s better at 4K resolution?
List of games that support FSR 4.
For example, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 or Assassin’s Creed Shadows only have FSR 3.1, while if you want to use DLSS 4 with these two games, you just need to enable the override feature in NVIDIA’s driver. Or Indiana Jones and the Great Circle cannot be upgraded to FSR 4 because it uses Vulkan, while DLSS 4 does not have this limitation.
So even though AMD has almost caught up with NVIDIA in terms of software, the red team is still far behind the blue team in terms of the number of supported games and the speed of new driver releases. If AMD can accelerate the coverage of FSR 4 for games in 2025, their products can truly compete with NVIDIA in the AI upscaling segment.