FSR 4 Has Improved, but DLSS 4 Is Still Far Ahead — Digital Foundry Test

The experts at Digital Foundry conducted a comparison of FSR 4 and DLSS to see how close AMD's latest technology has come to its NVIDIA counterpart. The testing revealed key improvements in FSR 4 over its predecessor, as well as its weaknesses compared to DLSS 4.

FSR 4’s main advantage is its improved image quality. Compared to FSR 3, it reduces blurring on transparent surfaces, minimizes artifacts on moving objects, and enhances anti-aliasing. As a result, visuals are sharper and more stable. However, this improvement comes at a cost: in tests, FSR 4 was about 8% slower than its predecessor at the same settings. FSR 4 is also the first generation of AMD's upscaling technology to incorporate machine learning. However, the new version is only available on RDNA 4 GPUs and is not supported on older AMD graphics cards, as well as on NVIDIA and Intel GPUs.

Compared to DLSS, the gap remains noticeable. While FSR 4 can now compete with earlier versions of DLSS, it still falls significantly behind NVIDIA’s DLSS 4 Transformer in terms of detail and image stability. Moreover, FSR 4 is more resource-intensive: in Horizon Forbidden West, it runs 20% slower on the Radeon RX 9070 XT than DLSS 4 in CNN mode on the RTX 5070 Ti and is only 5% slower when compared to DLSS 4 Transformer, which itself is quite demanding.

FSR 4 is a significant step forward for AMD, but it still trails DLSS in image quality and performance. If AMD wants to close the gap, it needs to continue advancing machine learning in its upscalers.