Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth - DLSS3 vs FSR3 vs XeSS

[mackerel]

Been looking forward to this game ever since it was officially announced. Released since Thursday and been playing it on my laptop (3070) using my TV. I had to turn down settings and use DLSS to drive that 4k output. Today I finally got around to moving my 4070 to my 11700k system and put that by the TV. Let's make use of that increased power!

At "highest" I'd get around 45fps at native 4k. Let's try DLSS3 (upscale only). It got the fps up but with the side effect of a building with fine lines was flickering pretty annoyingly. Ok, let's try FSR3. This didn't suffer from that, but it had the FSR problem I saw in Forspoken, in that the character's hair sizzled. That's differently bad. Ok, last option, XeSS... and it seems to work fine. Building lines were stable, and no problems with the character's hair. Guess I'm using that.

I tried frame generation with DLSS3 and FSR3. It works, but both still had their underlying problems. DLSS3 wont let you use FG without upscaling. FSR3 does. I did not look at latency in detail. At least in the short time I tried it, they all felt ok.

I hope Digital Foundry covers this game. I should be spending more time playing it, not looking at pixels under various settings!

(or I could get a 4080 super?...)

 

[mackerel]

Wrote this for another forum but thought it might be of interest here too.

Have some images for your pixel peeping pleasure.

Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, 1.18 patch (8 March 2024)
3070 with 551.76 drivers
2560x1440p display
Game set to highest preset, then motion blur off, and adjusted the AA/upscaler as below.

Screenshots taken in png format using Nvidia overlay. I then resaved them as jpg at maximum quality setting, and used a lossless jpeg crop tool to show small extracts below. This should avoid resizing of the image by forum/browser and thus show the presented pixels as is.

Good places to look for comparison between these samples are the boats to the lower left, and the sun lit buildings on both the left and right sides.

Important note: this is a single still image which obviously can't show temporal problems with these technologies. FSR1 lacking temporal smoothing meant fine details flickered pretty badly and the lower input resolution can show up in places with pixelation and/or jaggies. FSR3 upscaling does use temporal techniques but is the weakest of all implementations, and not shown in this shot is a weird effect in the character's hair. FSR3 in AA only mode was much better looking, but you don't gain the upscaling driven performance benefits. DLSS worked fine generally, as did XeSS. I didn't find an option for DLAA. I do find XeSS most stable and is my choice in this game. Now that I compare these still images, XeSS does look softer and possibly lower contrast than others. That could be the tradeoff for better stability. I don't notice that difference in quality in game. Some of these offered "ultra quality" preset also, which I didn't use in this example to keep things logically consistent from a user perspective.

I think to best show the differences between these, a video recording is required. To make that is outside my motivation level right now.


Game native rendering


FSR3 AA only, no upscaling, no frame generation


FSR3 Quality, no frame generation


FSR1 Quality


XeSS Quality


DLSS Quality


Game native full screenshot for context of the crop location/size.