NVIDIA DLSS 4 vs DLSS 3 Image Quality Compared: Years Ahead of AMD FSR 3 & Sony PSSR

NVIDIA announced DLSS 4 alongside the GeForce RTX 50 series “Blackwell” GPUs at CES earlier this month. Multi Frame Generation (MFG) is exclusive to the RTX 5090 and its siblings, but improved upscaling is coming to all RTX GPUs. The shift from a CNN to a Transformer-based neural network delivers sharper images, retaining more detail.

[Goodguy01]

Nvidia is simply just too unmatched when it comes to the gpu and ai upscaling, no competition and why they're able to price their cards so high unfortunately.

[ZycoFox]

Too bad their new GPUs are basically near a refresh of the previous gen but still far ahead, a used 4090 (at the right price) is looking good right now.

Or just go new with the upcoming gen.. only problem is the gap between the 5080 and 5090, 5090 isn't massively better (decent, about 30% better) than the 4090 and costs a lot more, the 5080 is still going to be behind the 4090, not as much VRAM but maybe 10-15% behind.. not terrible but not great either.

Maybe next gen will be the push for more performance, instead of using these fake frames that only make the visible frame rate higher but not better latency... I suspect this will be a thing on next console marketing (high FPS) but fail to mention the latency to trick the non-technical minded.

[DivineHand125]

Blame the manufacturing process. They couldn't have made much better improvements because both the RTX 4090 and 5090 are 5nm chips. The next generation should provide a more significant improvement when manufacturers are able to shrink the transistors further.

The 50 series isn't a big letdown and shouldn't be downplayed too much. People moving from 30 series or lower will see a significant improvement in all aspects.

[Tapani]

The 4090 is awesome! Strangely, more expensive today than when it launched. 5090 has pretty much the same performance using the same watts, because it can't feed the extra cores with 450W. 600W GPU is a bit too much for me, although I guess I could go for a max 1000W PSU. Just not very comfortable with that kind of GPUs transient spikes, apparently they go up to 901W according to TechpowerUp review.

That leaves 99W for the rest of the system + the CPU would also have transient spikes, so you need a 1250W PSU to feel comfortable. Where I live, that is the max you can draw from the wall and one would not be able to use extension cables due to safety issues, so I'm happy to wait for the 6090 on a better node and wish it would be max 500W.

[porkChop]

Yup. Their GPUs are just better, their tech is better, their software is miles ahead. Unfortunately AMD pretty much gave up trying to really compete which is why I'll never buy them again. Intel is offering really great value and performance in the lower end though, so I'm hoping as their architecture and software matures they can really take the fight to the high end.

I'd love to support another GPU brand but I'd have to give up DLSS, RTX Remix, PhysX support for my older games, and a ton of RTX support in games. They need to have something equally as useful/beneficial to offer consumers.

[mkis007]

Well it came out literally years before pssr. IDK amd's excuse for fsr. This is also the entirety of NVidia's business. If sony was that close on first release it might be a little sad for nvidia.

[porkChop]

It's not even really about time. Nvidia has the best engineers for both hardware and software. Sony just can't compete with that. PSSR isn't bad and it'll continue to get better, but the gap between PSSR and DLSS will likely get bigger over time.

[Whitey2k]

I wouldn't say the best they just been doing for years I'd say sony engineers doing good considering how long pssr been out and already trades blows with dlss 3.2 in some areas

[Fishy Fingers]

The best thing to about this is the new Transformer upscaler (while being more demanding - few frames) will be supported from the 20 gen onwards.

[1nsomniac]

it seems pretty demanding on a 20 series card, obviously dependant on which card and what game. But it does hit hard and is noticeably more than "a few frames". watched a comparison earlier that showed I think it was a 15-25fps negative difference between the same scene on DLSS 3.8 vs DLSS 4. Strangely enough DLSS 4 seems to work best on the 40 series. Difference was about 2-4fps.

[hennessey86]

I think the frame hit was when Ray reconstruction was in use, super res had less of a an imapct

[VariantAEC]

They didn't even compare PSSR to anything. It wasn't mentioned once in the article outside of the headline. How was this approved?

[883]

Thought the same thing. Additionally, until DLSS 4, there were a number of articles that talked about (including quotes form developers) how PSSR (when done right) was close to DLSS - and there was a recent headline about PSSR being significantly improved already. So, the fact that they bothered to mention PSSR in the headline, said nothing about it in the article, and the other information mentioned, suggests interesting things.
That said DLSS 4 is seriously awesome.

[Miacosa]

DLSS is a 5-year older technology and it should have better image quality.

[VariantAEC]

FXAA is 13 years old. MSAA is almost 20 years old.

[UltimateOwnage]

DLSS4 is all fine and dandy except that in only works with a small pool of titles and will continue to be limited to only specific titles. The base performance of these cards is only marginally faster than the last generation without it. It’s sort of disappointing that the only way to advance frame rate performance at this point is to fake a stack of frames.

[Whitey2k]

Of course it is dlss has been out for how long? And pssr is newly released and it's already not far behind dlss 3.2 and already beating fsr 3. So something tells me once pssr improves further it won't be long before pssr won't be far behind dlss 4 and beat fsr 4

[RedDeadLB]

All of this is still artifact-filled sh?t, DLSS is just the least artifact-filled sh?t.

[RiseNShine]

They've already found a way to make DLSS4 work on 40xx lol, just google it, no need for 50xx for 30% more rasterized performance and tons of fake frames, just use your current 40xx card and wait for 60xx.

[1nsomniac]

DLSS4 is designed to work with ALL RTX cards from the offset. It’s never been locked to 50 series cards. The only tech that is locked is MFG (multi-frame generation), is that what you meant?..

I’ve just googled it and can only find 1 result linking to a YouTuber who completely misquotes Nvidia, despite having the actual quote displayed on the screen. I can only assume this is intentional in order to get more hits. I think you’ve been misinformed.

[RiseNShine]

You may be right, it looks like MFG is locked to 50xx but not vanilla DLSS4, so if i don't find anything that says otherwise i stand corrected.

[AnotherGamer]

But at what cost?