Should You Play Assassin’s Creed Shadows With DLSS4 or FSR?

Are you confused about picking the right upscaler to play Assassin’s Creed Shadows? Stay tuned as we discuss the available options.

Which upscaler is best for you, Xess, DLSS 4, FSR in Assassin's Creed Shadows — Which upscaler is best for you, Xess, DLSS 4, FSR in Assassin’s Creed Shadows (Image via Ubisoft | Deltia’s Gaming)

Gaming in 2025 has evolved drastically from a decade ago. Modern rendering techniques, such as ray tracing, are the trend. The game visuals have undoubtedly become breathtaking. However, games have become more complicated, even on current-gen hardware. Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a prime example. The game looks stunning but can be challenging to run on high-end hardware. If you look up closely, this is expected behavior.

Bashing game developers for poor optimization may seem to be a trend. However, raytracing in a game requires the GPU to calculate accurately how lighting is simulated in real life. This produces an image with a lot of noise, which the GPU then has to clean up efficiently so that we can understand what’s going on on the screen. This complex process is highly demanding and significantly reduces frame rates.

To counteract this, GPU manufacturers developed upscaling solutions. To render the game at a much lower resolution, use the GPU’s mathematical computing capabilities to predict the targeted resolution and output the image. With that said, find out which Upscaler suits you best.

DLSS 4 vs. FSR – Picking the Correct Upscaler

Assassin's Creed Shadows Settings to chose upscaler model — Settings Page for Assassin’s Creed Shadows (Image via Deltia’s Gaming | Ubisoft)

Before answering this directly, we would like to clarify a few things:

Assassin’s Creed Shadows does not natively support DLSS 4, but you can enable it by following our guide.

DLSS 3.7 (which uses the CNN model) is available out of the box in Assassin’s Creed Shadows. DLSS 4 (based on a Transformer model) is more computationally intensive but generally provides better image quality and stability.

DLSS 3.7 already outperforms FSR 3.1 regarding image quality, clarity, stability, and motion artifact reduction.

For NVIDIA Users: Use DLSS

If you’re using an NVIDIA GPU, the choice is simple—DLSS favors being the superior choice.

Enable DLSS in the game’s settings. If you swap to DLSS 4, it should work without any concern.
Adjust the upscaling quality to balance performance and visuals.
Check out our optimal settings guide for further fine-tuning.

Our recommendation: Please do trial and error and check which DLSS model performs best. If you want to experiment with DLSS 4, you’ll need to manually enable it using external tweaks (guide linked).

For AMD Users: FSR 3.1 vs. XeSS

AMD users have two upscaling options: FSR 3.1 and XeSS (Intel’s upscaler).

Assassin’s Creed Shadows supports FSR 3.1, but FSR 4 is not officially available yet.
AMD has not confirmed whether FSR 4 will support older GPUs like the RX 7000 series.
XeSS and FSR 3.1 perform similarly—sometimes FSR looks better, and other times XeSS offers better temporal stability.

Our Recommendation: Test both and choose the one that provides better stability for your setup.

For Intel Arc Users: Use XeSS

If you have an Intel Arc Alchemist or Battlemage GPU, XeSS is the best option because:

Intel GPUs have dedicated Xe Matrix Extensions (XMX) that accelerate XeSS.
On non-Intel GPUs, XeSS falls back to DP4A mode, which is slower and less effective.

Our Recommendation: Intel Arc users should stick to XeSS for optimal performance.

Frame Generation (FG): Second Wind for Old Hardware

Frame Generation (FG) is a separate feature that interpolates frames (FSR’s implementation) or uses motion vectors (DLSS’s implementation) to improve smoothness.

NVIDIA RTX 4000+ users can use DLSS 3 / 4 FG (which uses built-in optical flow accelerators).
Thanks to AMD’s open-source approach, older NVIDIA GPUs (RTX 3000 and below) can use FSR 3.1 FG in decoupled mode.
AMD GPUs support FSR 3.1 FG natively.

If you have an older NVIDIA or AMD GPU, FSR 3.1 FG can revive your hardware.

We provide the latest news and create guides for Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Meanwhile, you can check out the following AC Shadows articles or catch us playing games on Twitch and YouTube:

Should You Play Assassin’s Creed Shadows With DLSS4 or FSR?