I went back to the original resolution for a week, but Nvidia’s DLSS still felt like the wrong choice

I’ve been gaming since the turn of the century and spent the first two decades playing games at native resolution. In 2020, I bought an RTX 2070 Super and have been a believer in Nvidia’s DLSS technology ever since. As all things tend to do, it got off to a shaky start, but today DLSS is arguably the most powerful and most popular rendering technique in video games.

I have mentioned many times how simple the solution is is no longer the gold standardand yet I decided to return to it again. After all, what’s the harm in trying to get the sharpest image quality possible? After spending half a week switching the game back to native resolution, I’m back in my DLSS comfort zone, which is starting to feel better than the native game.

DLSS has grown impressively and I have grown with it

It’s now something I rely on daily

As a DLSS user since 2020, I’ve also lived through the days of “Vaseline” looking like a blurry mess every time you turn it on. The main difference between then and now is that back in the days of DLSS 2, it was mostly a bonus pass I activated, not a core part of my experience. It certainly worked, but it wasn’t something I believed in or put to work right away. Not every game came with ray tracing or terrible optimizationso DLSS was only an option I chose when ray tracing was involved. Fast forward to today, and my relationship with Nvidia’s suite of rendering technologies has evolved, to say the least. Now, DLSS is all about how I play every game and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

With DLSS 4.5, I simply increased the poetics That’s how good Nvidia’s upgrade has been. Even DLSS itself has expanded significantly, adding technologies like frame generation and dynamic resolution, and making sure every player knows and understands these rendering techniques. Between frame generation, path tracking, and ray reconstruction, DLSS has become a full-stack rendering solution, and it feels more like a necessity than an option, especially in path-tracked games, where I can’t live without it.

One thing that has particularly surprised me lately is that with DLSS 4, and especially its 4.5 iteration, I’ve switched to using DLSS even in my daily multiplayer games. Both of them Fortnite and Arc RaidersI never changed from native resolution at the expense of in-game graphics, now running at DLSS Balanced. In fact, I even use DLSS in Frame Generation Arc Raidersdespite being a multiplayer PvPvE titlebecause real-time image quality is so much better now with DLSS. So deciding to try out a local solver game was once again a tough call, but one that definitely got me interested.

The return to native resolution was costly

No, I’m not talking about average FPS

After switching to native resolution and using DLAA instead of DLSSexcited to see what I’ve been “missing” all this time. However, almost immediately, controversy began to rear its head. First, I had to crank up the in-game graphics settings across the board to maintain anything close to the framerates I’m used to. While DLSS lowers a game’s native resolution before upscaling it to provide more performance, DLAA keeps the game at native resolution, rendering it cleaner than traditional anti-aliasing methods like TAA. So it runs at native 1440p resolution Cyberpunk 2077 and Kingdom Come: Salvation II I immediately adjusted the FPS.

After all, local resolution does not exist in isolation – it cannot. This directly affects everything you can (or can’t) enable. To begin with, the native settings meant that ray tracing would no longer be possible on High or Ultra if I wanted 60 FPS. So in a few cases I had to either turn it down or turn it off completely. I find modern raster graphics incredibly impressive, but once get used to ray tracing In every game, no matter how good the character models and textures look, it’s hard not to notice a drop in quality in global lighting.

Of course, I couldn’t deny that the image quality on my screen was much sharper – clearer blades of grass and strands of hair. However, all of this still left a bitter taste in my mouth, primarily because I jumped from raytracing (or even pathtracing), maximum raster settings to High or Ultra settings as the lighting dropped. I was getting a clearer, “better” image on paper, but I couldn’t feel anything.

Native resolution at 4K was no longer a realistic option

It is impossible without high FPS, good visuals and 4K DLSS

It’s definitely sharper than native 1440p DLSS Quality, and even when I used Special K to upscale DLSS Quality’s native resolution from the default 66.6% to 80%, the native resolution’s superior clarity and sharpness was very apparent. But this whole discussion started to feel irrelevant the moment I switched to 4K. Ten a high refresh rate miniLED 4K TVthe equation has completely changed. Although I never thought of gaming in 4K (hence the RTX 4070 Ti instead of the RTX 4080), I went ahead and tried out native 4K gaming. The performance value was immediately amazing and turned my games into glorified slideshows.

DLSS 4.5, but it looked like the one behind me. The latest improvements to image quality and temporal stability, especially in the more aggressive Performance and Ultra Performance presets, make it a brilliant choice for high FPS 4K gaming. Before I knew it I was back in game settings, enabling ray tracing once again and increase the visuals to the High and Ultra presets. Even in DLSS Performance, which only offers 50% of the native resolution, everything looked great. Of course, even with DLSS, all the Quality presets make softer edges and smoothed-out details quite subtle. However, the increased pixel density, combined with better panel specs and a 55-inch screen size, masked many minor imperfections that I could see as clear as day on my 1440p 27-inch monitor.

Without DLSS, even my $2000 computer would be dead in the water and desperately trying to escape. Cyberpunk 2077 or Resident Evil Requiem With ray tracing at 4K resolution, no matter how low I go in the visual settings section. With the DLSS extension kit and frame generation, not only did I gain access to visual settings and experiences that would have been otherwise unattainable, but I couldn’t. feel it or compromise. Everything looked impressive and 4K 120FPS looked great.

I’m not the only one who prefers DLSS to native resolution

A blind test proved it

My preference for DLSS over native resolution isn’t an isolated thing either. A final blind test German company ComputerBase presented six different games, each shown in native resolution, DLSS Quality and FSR Quality in 4K. More than 48% of gamers out of nearly 7,000 voters rated DLSS 4.5’s visuals even better than native resolution. Of course, even AMD’s FSR managed to win 15% of the vote, but it still fell short of the native resolution’s 24% vote. Obviously, DLSS visuals look better to the blind, and quite understandably so.

At this point, pixel viewing depended on it like my life unless I put my nose to the screen, and I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between native resolution and DLSS quality, especially at 1440p. We’ve gotten to the point where “technically superior” doesn’t always translate to “visibly better,” at least not in action where it actually matters. When I’m actually playing, DLSS blends in seamlessly, without pausing to check leaves or edges.

Compared to how I felt when I first turned on DLSS, it no longer feels like an optional switch. DLSS now feels like an expected experience, surprisingly native resolution is no longer a self-guarantee.

I’m still cautious about the future of DLSS

As much as I love DLSS 4.5 and the undeniably solid improvements it brings, I can’t help but be cautious about the upcoming DLSS 5. From what we have seen so far, more attention is being paid to neural rendering techniques.

Now, this is not inherently a bad thing, but it does raise questions about priorities. Are we still improving basic image reconstruction and performance, or are we moving to more experimental visual tricks? If DLSS 5 can build on this foundation with meaningful performance gains, I’m all for it. But if it doesn’t do that, and instead leans too far into post-processing-style enhancements, it risks losing what made DLSS so appealing in the first place. For now, I’m sticking with what works – and watching very closely.