Debunking “FSR is just Lanczos” claims

So I will start off by saying FSR is based on Lanczos however it is much faster which allows better performance and it also solves a few major issues from Lanczos, most notably the ringing artifacts.

I took some screenshot comparisons of FSR vs FSR + RIS vs Lanczos with FidelityFX Sharpening in Rift Breaker vs FSR with Magpie + FidelityFX Sharpening

All images except Native are 720p to 1440p upscaled. Ray Tracing was turned to Max.

Magpie seems to add way more sharpening than the real FSR was even after adding 60% RIS

But anyways lets get back to MagPie to inject fsr vs injecting Lanczos

A super zoomed in on the characters will show the biggest difference in Magpie Lanczos vs Magpie FSR

You can see insane amounts of artifacts on the Lanczos scaling (Right) with a much better impage on the MagPie FSR (Left)

Not to mention the performance impact on Lanczos is insane.

Because I did not disable Fidelity FX on the MagPie FSR there are some over sharpening artifacts however its still much better than the Lanczos especially on the edges of objects.

tl;dr,

Alex is wrong by saying using Lanczos + Sharpening will give you the same image as FSR even when using Fidelity FX Sharpening on Lanczos its still no where near as good as FSR.

People are always trying to cast dispersion of some kind, it seems. I think most people ignore the FUD out of hand, but still I certainly agree with you.

should add a native 720 to the comparisons

It's worth mentioning that the Lanczos from Magpie is actually drastically different from every single other implementation I have seen so far, it looks much better (and it's also insanely heavy). I made a similar comparison once using the FSR demo from Github and comparing it vs a screenshot of it I took at 1080p and upscaled through FFmpeg, madVR and Hybrid.

Saying that the FSR results were a lot better would be a big understatement, not only I got much better edges with FSR but also all the ringing around edges was gone. And I did disabled the sharpening pass to make it fair, because I only wanted to compare the upscaling.

I'll add an edit with the links to the albums if I manage to find that comment I made a while ago.

Edit:

FFmpeg lanczos 1080p to 2160p

madVR lanczos 1080p to 2160p

FSR Performance with the sharpening disabled

Direct comparison 400% zoom

I didn't included the Hybrid results because it looked identical to the other two.

Who the hell says FSR is just Lanczos. The source code shows it's clearly not. They optimized it, removed the common artifact associated with that method and then added a edge detection routine, to keep edges nice and defined.

You can see it clearly in your left vs right comparison, the edges of that unit and it's weapon is smooth and clear while the regular Lanczos is jagged and aliased.

Its almost as if FSR being good enough, somehow hurts these morons who worship DLSS, especially those who keep on claiming its better than native.

About DLSS, here's Hardware Canucks 2021 look into it, and they were not impressed at all.

Funny they mention all of the issues I had with my week's experience with DLSS on a 3070. It's blurry in motion, ruins textures, and had terrible ghosting problems. Yet when I said it, I had fanboys pile on claiming I was making it up, DLSS was "better in motion"! Like total bullshit.

Edit: Removed the bad language.