How Nvidia’s cheapest RTX graphics card beats its AMD rival
Which, though, is the better buy? Both are 1080p-focused cards on sale for £300 or less, both sit at the bottom of their respective GPU hierarchies (the RTX 30 series and Radeon RX 6000 series), and both supportray tracing, so let’s break out the bar chart app and do some comparisons.
FSR is worth turning on when you’re struggling, as seen in Horizon Zero Dawn, where the upscaler’s Ultra Quality setting boosted the RX 6400 XT from a 40fps average at 1440p up to 50fps. DLSS is still a superior bit of tech, however, to the point where it can be worth paying more specifically for it. DLSS is capable of similarly impactful performance improvements, and because it uses a smarter form of temporal upscaling (as well as its own built-in anti-aliasing) than FSR, its upscaled results are pretty much always sharper-looking with finer detail reproduction. In some cases, DLSS on its highest quality setting can even look better than native resolution.
DLSS also comes in extremely handy for offsetting the performance loss from ray tracing, which both GPUs support and invariably scarfs a load of frames per second in whichever games include it. In fairness, FSR can perform the same FPS damage limitation role, but with the RX 6500 XT specifically, there’s so little power to begin with that enabling ray tracing is basically asking for trouble.
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