Is NVidia's DSR as taxing as real 4k?

[Jacktastic-Mofo]

So I've had a really pressing question on my mind for the past week or so and that question is:

 

"Is NVidia DSR as difficult to run as actual 4k?"

 

​This question occurred to me while on my GTX 960 4GB G1 Gaming Graphics Card by Gigabyte

I was able to run GTA 5 completely maxed out at DSR 4k (MSAA off obviously) without any real

problems, I was sitting in the mid twenties - low thirties which I could totally deal with at this beautiful

and glorious resolution. So what do you think?

 

Below are some 4K screenshots, sorry if they're super compressed or anything!

 

  

[Glenwing]

It does seem to be about the same from my testing.

 

Tested with my GTX 780 Ti 1200MHz on Crysis 3

 

1080p: 63.283

4K: 18.067

1080p w/ 4K DSR: 19.328

[Ostwind]

The card has to render more pixels before downsampling them to your resolution so logic would dictate that it's about as hard to use X resolution downsampled as it is natively.

[Timmy-P]

On the processing/rendering side of things, DSR is the exact same as running at the resolution in question on a monitor that can support it without downsampling. The only difference is that with DSR the image is scaled down to your monitor's resolution, but it's the same thing otherwise.

[typographie]

If it's rendering 8,294,400 pixels, it's going to run like it's rendering 8,294,400 pixels. Assuming DSR works like I think it does, it should be about the same.