ComputerBase tested whether gamers notice the difference between native 4K and modern upscaling tools.
The German publication ComputerBase conducted a blind test of upscaling technologies and native rendering. Native 4K with TAA, NVIDIA DLSS 4.5, and AMD FSR 4 were compared. More than a thousand community users participated in the voting.
The testing took place in six games: Cyberpunk 2077, Horizon Forbidden West, The Last of Us Part II, Anno 117, ARC Raiders, and Satisfactory. All comparisons were performed in 4K resolution. TAA was used for the native mode, while DLSS 4.5 and FSR 4 operated in "Quality" mode.
According to the voting results, DLSS 4.5 received 48.2% of the votes—a total of 3249. The native image took second place with 24%, and FSR 4 scored 15%. Another 12.8% of participants stated that they did not notice any differences between the options. In each of the games, DLSS 4.5 either confidently led or showed a minimal gap from the native mode. The closest result was recorded in Cyberpunk 2077, where preferences were distributed almost equally.
ComputerBase emphasizes that participants were not told which method was used in each video. The options were neutrally labeled as 1, 2, 3, and 4, which reduced the influence of bias. According to the publication, the results demonstrate that modern upscaling algorithms are increasingly perceived as a preferable alternative to native rendering with TAA.
At the same time, ComputerBase separately emphasizes an important nuance: the results only reflect which option participants most often called the "best in image quality." The test did not record second and third places and did not measure the degree of difference between the options. Therefore, it would be incorrect to conclude that "FSR looks worse than native rendering."
