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PC gaming refuses to slow down, and the technology behind it keeps getting better.
Cale Hunt
What is NVIDIA DLSS?
A slide pulled from AMD’s presentation shows Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 GPUs from AMD’s board partners.
NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) is something of a marvel.
It’s a proprietary technology that uses artificial intelligence to maximize frame rates while making your games look better.
Whenray tracing and DLSSare combined, the results can be particularly impressive.
A slide pulled from AMD’s presentation shows Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 GPUs from AMD’s board partners.
DLSS 3 was then introduced in September 2022 for NVIDIA’s RTX 40-series GPUs.
DLSS 3.5 is now here with Ray Reconstruction which improves ray tracing even further with the help of AI.
Alongside theannouncement of new RTX 5000 GPUs at CES 2025, NVIDIA showcased its new DLSS 4 upgrade.
However, the new DLSS 4Multi Frame Generationis only available onRTX 5000 “Blackwell” cards.
That’s mostly due to the RTX 5000’s specialized architecture that improves neural rendering abilities.
Yes, DLSS 4 relies more than ever on AI to achieve its goals.
The improvements are substantial, with NVIDIA showing off Cyberpunk 2077 running at about 30 FPS without DLSS.
With DLSS 4 enabled, that number jumps to 235 FPS and beyond.
More are expected to arrive in the near future.
you could check outNVIDIA’s list of hundreds of games and appsthat support RTX tech.
It also works in VLC Media Player.
You’ll need a monitor with HDR abilities to properly view the content.
What is AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution?
This is AMD’s answer to NVIDIA DLSS, and it originally launched in 2021.
Nor does it require any per-game training."
This was no doubt the biggest difference between two technologies that attempt to achieve the same end goal.
AMD FSR 2 launched in 2023, adding improved ray tracing with GPUs from the Radeon RX 7900 series.
It also improved upscaled image quality compared to the first version of FSR.
A slide pulled from AMD’s presentation shows Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 GPUs from AMD’s board partners.
This greatly improves framerates, especially as you scale up resolution or enable ray tracing.
AMD’s FSR landscape is set to change alongside its RDNA 4 next-gen GPUs.
Nevertheless, there’s quite a bit to unpack in terms of the evolution of FSR.
That changes with FSR.
There’s still not a lot of FSR 4 information beyond a few slides in a presentation.
What is Intel XeSS?
An Intel slide showing XeSS 1.3 improvements on the Arc A750 GPU.
Intel lists 145 games compatible with XeSS, filling in some gaps left over by NVIDIA and AMD.
Intel Arc Alchemist and Battlemage GPUs have XMX cores for AI acceleration, similar to NVIDIA’s Tensor cores.
Intel unveiled XeSS 1.3 in April 2024, improving frame rates while also further reducing aliasing and ghosting.
In the discrete GPU, Intel suggested an average 10% increase in frame rates across supported titles.
On the integrated graphics side, the average suggested by Intel fell to about 8%.
Still not bad at all.
The DirectX 12 logo
Intel says this was mostly achieved through updates to its AI models.
In December 2024, Intel revealed XeSS 2.
With XeSS 2 Super Resolution comes XeSS Frame Generation and Xe Low Latency (XeLL).
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Plus SoC
XeLL is essentially a way for Intel to eliminate the latency produced by XeSS Frame Generation.
This all goes into a significant performance boost, especially in Battlemage GPUs.
What is DirectX Super Resolution?
Microsoft announced DirectSR in February 2024as a “missing link” for developers working with Super Resolution technologies.
DirectSR is available to developers through the Agility SDK and is compatible with Windows 10 andWindows 11. you could also check out theWorksonWoA websitefor a list of titles that support Auto SR.
