Digital Foundry has shared their comprehensive analysis of AMD FSR 4, comparing it against NVIDIA DLSS to assess how far AMD's new upscaling tech has come in challenging its rival. Through rigorous testing, several standout improvements were identified in FSR 4 over its previous iteration, as well as areas where it still trails DLSS 4.

The primary advancement of FSR 4 lies in its enhanced visual fidelity. Compared to FSR 3, this version significantly reduces blurring on transparent surfaces, minimizes artifacts caused by moving objects, and improves anti-aliasing for a sharper, more stable final output. However, these gains come at a cost: benchmarks reveal that FSR 4 is approximately 8% slower than FSR 3 under identical settings. Notably, FSR 4 marks the first generation of AMD's upscaling technology powered by machine learning, though its availability is restricted to RDNA 4 GPUs, excluding older AMD cards and hardware from competitors like NVIDIA or Intel.

When juxtaposed with DLSS, the gap remains evident. Although FSR 4 can now rival earlier iterations of DLSS in terms of image clarity, it falls short when compared to NVIDIA's cutting-edge DLSS 4 Transformer, particularly in aspects such as fine detail preservation and frame stability. Moreover, FSR 4 demands greater system resources; for instance, in Horizon Forbidden West running FSR 4 on a Radeon RX 9070 XT results in performance being 20% slower than DLSS 4 CNN mode on an RTX 5070 Ti. It performs only slightly better (-5%) when matched against DLSS 4 Transformer, which itself is resource-intensive.

While FSR 4 represents a meaningful leap forward for AMD, it continues to trail behind DLSS in both image quality and efficiency. To bridge the gap, AMD must further invest in refining machine learning algorithms within their upscalers.  

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