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Comment by Eisenstein | Hacker News Reader

Unlike DLSS, AMD's upscaling tech works cross vendor, so I am not sure what the big deal is. I have a 3080 and I don't notice any difference between DLSS and FSR on games, and Starfield is running fine and looks great at 4K with whatever the default settings are at 'High/Ultra'.

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In other games, DLSS2 looks better to me, but the difference is mostly apparent at high scaling factors (like the "performance" preset).

...And I briefly launched Starfield just because it came with my CPU, and to be blunt, it looks hilariously dated, and runs like a pig. Cyberpunk 2077 looks better on my laptop 2060 than Starfield does on my desktop 3090, at about the same framerate on a 4K TV. The resemblance to Oblivion is uncanny.

Don't get me wrong, I love the old BGS games and don't really care about their dated visuals, I'm just saying Starfield is a horrible test for upscaling technology.

no idea what you're getting at, SF looks mighty fine :)

If you don't see differences between DLSS and FSR it's on you there are numerous tests and reviews from well known outlets that just tell you that.

In my experience, people are sensitive to different aspects/weaknesses in game graphics. For instance, I don't really notice any difference between 60 and 120 FPS. I am also not very bothered by traversal stutter.

What I AM sensitive to however, is temporal instability - it just draws my attention and hurts immersion. Here DLSS makes a huge difference, as shown here[0].

Therefore it is sad that Bethesda chose[1] to deliver worse than possible image quality for 80%+ of their PC customers[2].

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[0] https://youtu.be/ciOFwUBTs5s?feature=shared&t=336

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37452149

[2] https://archive.ph/mqPLK, nvidia has 75% market share here, but you have to look at the higher end parts only and exclude Intel as Starfield does not run at all on their GPUs[3]

[3] https://in.ign.com/starfield/193351/news/starfield-intel-fin...

FSR has way more noticeable artifacting and in general looks worse than DLSS

You might not notice a difference but neither does grandma notice motion smoothing on her TV.

FSR2 has a bunch more fizzle in high frequency detail (specular and foliage), more severe disocclusion artifacts causing streaking and ghosting behind moving objects and it runs worse than DLSS since it eats into the raster budget instead of using discreet hardware like Nvidia's tensor cores.

I'd suggest that in future discussions you refrain from metaphors which use insulting connotations as it makes it difficult for the person to follow up without getting defensive. Perhaps try: 'you may not notice a difference, and I don't notice the difference between really good wine or mediocre wine, but there are people who can'.

I know this discussion is about a game, but lets not turn HN into a toxic gamer forum where we try to belittle each other and drop tech terms to gain cred.

There's a lot of bullshit in wine tasting. It's not total junk but double blind tests show experts assigning different flavor profiles to the same bottles/vintages and vice versa and non-experts coming to many of the same conclusions re: quality which mostly comes down to a lack of balance between acidity and sweetness. With DLSS vs FSR2, there is an objectively measurable difference in quality.

Apologies if you felt belittled. The "grandma doesn't notice motion smoothing" metaphor was used because of it being a shared experienced among the technologically savvy, though I get how it could be interpreted as insulting. Nothing wrong with being a grandma, they don't know any better.

I like the idea of "discreet hardware".

"Oh, you have tensor cores? I had no idea."

"One does not like to brag."

And more importantly for Microsoft it also works on game consoles.

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