Should you play Assassin's Creed Shadows with DLSS 4 or FSR?

Assassin's Creed Shadows was released on March 20, 2025, on all major platforms, including PC. The game features advanced ray-tracing technologies that can transform its environment.

If you plan on using all the ray tracing features, you must enable upscaling like DLSS or FSR to run the game at decent performance. However, users are confused about whether to use DLSS 4 or FSR upscaling technology.

In this article, we will analyze DLSS 4 and FSR upscaling technologies in Assassin's Creed Shadows and explain which one you should choose.

Note: Some aspects of this article are subjective and reflect the writer's opinions.

---

DLSS 4 vs FSR in Assassin's Creed Shadows

Naoe in Assassin's Creed Shadows (Image via Ubisoft)

DLSS and FSR are two upscaling technologies that help GPUs deliver higher FPS by rendering the game at a lower resolution and then upscaling it to your desired resolution. This results in minimal visual quality but delivers much higher performance.

Both technologies have reached version four and can be used in Assassin's Creed Shadows without any issues. However, they have distinct builds and run on different hardware. Whether you should use DLSS and FSR in this game depends on a few factors explained below.

---

Upscaling

Nvidia DLSS requires newer Nvidia RTX cards to use this technology and cannot run on older GTX GPUs. Currently, Nvidia has two AI models for DLSS: CNN and Transformer.

The CNN models deliver good image quality with a decent performance, while the newer Transformer model provides much better image quality. That said, it comes at the cost of performance. Nonetheless, the Nvidia RTX graphics card owners should use DLSS in Assassin's Creed Shadows.

On the other hand, AMD Radeon owners up until the Radeon 7000 series should use FSR 3 only, which is not as good as DLSS but gets the job done. Even Nvidia's older GTX cards can use FSR 3 since they do not support DLSS. Only the newer Radeon 9000 series GPUs can only FSR 4.

In terms of image quality, DLSS Transformer > FSR 4 > DLSS CNN > FSR 3 and older. This should help you make a better choice. Therefore, DLSS wins in upscaling.

---

Frame Generation and Multi-Frame Generation

When it comes to frame generation, the situation is completely different. AMD's FSR Frame Generation is much better than Nvidia's DLSS. The former produces a cleaner and artifact-free image quality. Even the performance uplift of FSR Frame Generation is better than DLSS in many games. AMD wins in Frame Generation.

However, when it comes to Multi-Frame Generation (MFR), Nvidia DLSS is the only choice since AMD doesn't have it yet.

---

In essence, Nvidia RTX GPU users should stick to DLSS for upscaling, while AMD Radeon graphics card owners can only choose FSR. Users with older GTX cards can also use FSR since DLSS is not available for them.

However, when it comes to Frame Generation in Assassin's Creed Shadows, both Nvidia and AMD users should use FSR Frame Generation, which is better than DLSS. You shouldn't use Nvidia's Frame Generation unless it is MFR.