Benchmark setups DLSS vs FSR in 2026: What a Massive Blind Test Actually Reveals About Upscaling DLSS vs FSR, For years, the debate between NVIDIA’s DLSS and AMD’s FSR has played out mostly in forums, comment sections, and YouTube comparison videos, often colored heavily by which brand of graphics card the person doing the comparing happened to own. That changed recently when a large scale blind test removed brand bias from the equation entirely, and the results have become one of the most talked about hardware stories of the year. If you have seen headlines about this test and wondered what it actually means for your next graphics card purchase, here is the full picture. What actually happened in this test The German publication ComputerBase ran an online blind test comparing the image quality of Nvidia’s DLSS 4.5 against AMD’s FSR 4 and native resolution rendering using standard temporal anti aliasing, across six major current games. Over 6,500 gamers took part, making it one of the largest blind comparisons of its kind. The test ran at 4K resolution using the quality preset for both upscaling technologies, across titles including Anno 117, ARC Raiders, Cyberpunk 2077, Horizon Forbidden West, Satisfactory, and The Last of Us Part II. Crucially, participants did not know which rendering method they were looking at in each comparison. They were simply shown footage and asked which looked best, removing the brand loyalty and preconceptions that normally color these discussions. This is what makes the results genuinely significant rather than just another opinion piece.(DLSS vs FSR) The results, and why they surprised a lot of people Of the participants, about 48.2 percent preferred Nvidia’s DLSS 4.5, while roughly 24 percent preferred native rendering, and only around 15 percent preferred AMD’s FSR 4, with the remaining participants finding the three nearly equivalent. DLSS 4.5 emerged as the winner across every single game tested, not just on average.
What makes this genuinely notable is not simply that DLSS won. It is that upscaled, AI reconstructed footage beat native resolution rendering, the long held gold standard that upscaling technologies have always been measured against and historically fell short of. This result does not entirely surprise people who follow usage data closely, since most Nvidia GPU owners already enable DLSS whenever it is available, and this test now shows many of them genuinely prefer how it looks, not just how it performs The gap was not uniform across every game. In titles like Satisfactory and Horizon Forbidden West, the difference between DLSS 4.5 and FSR 4 was especially wide, while in Cyberpunk 2077, a notable portion of participants, around 23 percent, could not perceive much difference between the two at all. That detail matters, because it suggests the real world gap between these technologies is not constant. It depends heavily on how well a specific game has implemented each upscaling method, not purely on the underlying technology itself A quick refresher on what these technologies actually do
Both DLSS and FSR exist to solve the same basic problem. Rendering a game at full native resolution, especially with demanding visual settings like ray tracing enabled, takes a huge amount of graphics processing power. Upscaling technologies render the game internally at a lower resolution, which is much faster, and then use an algorithm to intelligently reconstruct a sharper, more detailed final image before it reaches your screen. Complete here