In blind test, gamers think DLSS looks better than native rendering

Hassam Nasir: Nearly half of PC gamers prefer DLSS 4.5 over AMD's FSR and even native rendering (emphasis mine)

German outlet ComputerBase has conducted a blind test comparing the image quality of six games across different rendering techniques. The main showdown was between Nvidia's latest DLSS 4.5 and AMD's latest FSR 4 (Redstone) technologies, going up against native rendering using TAA. After the votes were tallied, DLSS walked away with a clear and dominant victory, scoring 48.2% of all votes.

This will have to be a podcast topic, but this study doesn’t surprise me at all. The PC gaming community online has been (IMO) bizarrely opposed to this technology, despite analytics showing most people with NVIDIA GPUs enable DLSS when it's available and now in blind tests, actually prefer DLSS image quality over native rendering with TAA.

It wasn't part of the test, but it's also worth saying that not only did users prefer the DLSS image in terms of quality, they would have also enjoyed playing the games more because their frame rates were higher, and because of that frame rate increase, the games' input latency would be faster as well. So better image quality, better frame rates, and better input latency, and still some gamers thumb their nose at this tech.

For the past year, this video from Linus Tech Tips has been living rent-free in my head. Around the 7 minute mark, Linus and I'm sorry, I don't know the other guy's name, are playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider and are pointing out countless flaws in the picture quality, and the "guy whose name I don't know" really lays it on thick as this being the reason he can't use DLSS. Moments later, they venture to the game's video settings menu and realize they didn't even have DLSS on…their complaints were about native rendering. For his part, Linus has seemed to come around on DLSS and frame generation in the past year, but situations like this seem all too common.