Native is "dead" — gamers in a blind test chose DLSS 4.5 over native and FSR 4

Native is "Dead" – Gamers in a Blind Test Chose DLSS 4.5 Over Native and FSR 4

In February 2026, the publication ComputerBase conducted one of the largest blind tests in the history of gaming hardware. Over 6,000 participants evaluated image quality in six modern games (Cyberpunk 2077, Horizon Forbidden West, The Last of Us Part II, etc.) without knowing which technology was being used at the time.

The results turned out to be relatively expected – almost half of the players (48.2%) named the image using NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 as the best, ranking it above native resolution and AMD's new AI upscaler.

The reason for this is extremely simple – DLSS 4.5 produces the sharpest image, which creates the impression of superiority for many. At the same time, obvious problems with excessive sharpness and pixelation go unnoticed.

It will also come as no surprise that native rendering with TAA blur lost to DLSS 4.5. Especially when it comes to absolutely terrible implementations of this anti-aliasing, like the one used in Cyberpunk 2077.

Meanwhile, FSR 4 ended up in last place in these polls. The reason for this is obviously the excessive softness of the image, which, however, is almost always significantly more stable than the image with TAA.

Overall, users chose based on image sharpness, and this is entirely expected.