AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution is impressive with improved PC gaming performance and excellent visuals

When AMD launched the Radeon RX 6000 series PC gaming graphics cards late last year, the company finally regained the threat of high-end GPUs that are more competitive than its rival NVIDIA. In the performance comparison, checkbox items for various technology features were introduced, including support for DirectX ray tracing and a technology that improves image quality and performance, which AMD simply calls “super-resolution.” Similar to NVIDIA’s AI-powered DLSS (Deep Learning Super-Sampling) technology, AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) is finally fully announced this month, claiming to offer similar image quality and significant performance improvements. However, it is open source and does not require any special hardware to run. In fact, soon available through AMD’s GPU Open MIT license, FSR will be able to run on NVIDIA’s competing GPUs and even Intel GPUs. As you can imagine, this cross-GPU platform feature provides game developers with a great incentive to adopt FSR and has a significant potential installation base for game hardware (and gamers) who can benefit from this technology. It will be bigger.

How AMD FSR works without special hardware

As mentioned earlier, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution is vendor independent and does not require any special hardware to function, while NVIDIA DLSS relies on NVIDIA Turing or onboard Tensor core resources. Amper GPU, To accelerate a specially trained neural network model in the game engine it is enabled for. DLSS stands out because it uses temporary supersampling (upscaling) across multiple frames in the game engine and motion vectors that allow AI to track movement within the frame to improve image stability. “Swimming” is not seen. “Artifact. In contrast, AMD FSR uses only traditional spatial upscaling to create “super-resolution” images from a single input frame rather than multiple frames. AMD also claims that FSR utilizes a library of special algorithms that work to sharpen both the edges and texture details of the image.

The end result of FSR is that, for example, 4K or 1440p high resolution in-game settings require an input resolution workload of about one-third to one-half of the target game resolution to render. Output images that are very close to native 4K or 1440p high resolution images. The table above shows the resulting input resolution in FSR Ultra Quality, Quality, Balanced, and Performance modes. After the image is rendered and upscaled at a lower input resolution, the GPU acceleration algorithm enhances the edges of the objects in the scene, adds texture sharpening, and outputs the frame. This is what the company calls “advanced.” “Edge reconstruction algorithm” in game preset resolution and image quality settings.

AMD FidelityFX Super-Resolution Image Quality and Performance

It all sounds pretty complicated (and it does), but AMD claims that gamers can achieve significant performance gains of up to 2.4x with the FSR maximum performance setting, but there are some. There is a trade-off in image quality. If you’re peeking into a pixel, most gamers can land somewhere between Ultra, Quality, and Balanced modes. That said Image quality comparison with Hot Hardware FSR is real.For example, in an action role-playing game GodfallIt’s hard to understand the difference between 4K native resolution gameplay and 4K image quality with AMD FSR quality mode enabled.

In addition, as Ben Hot Hardware found in the benchmarkThe frame rate jumps significantly to 63% on the Radeon RX 6800 XT with the Quality preset and 57% on the GeForce RTX 3070, surpassing 100 FPS on the Radeon GPU and reaching 4K at maximum in-game quality.

Also, on low-end hardware, this can mean the difference between playable and non-playable frame rates, as seen in Hot Hardware, where action RPG titles include the GeForce RTX 1650 Super. There is sex. Lift breaker, From about 34FPS in native 4K setting to 67FPS when QualityFidelityFX super-resolution setting is enabled. In short, FSR has the potential to bring new life to older graphics cards for many gamers. This is a welcome opportunity for many in the ongoing GPU shortage.

In addition to these performance improvements and image quality results, one question that is being asked in the minds of enthusiasts is probably “Which is better, DLSS or FSR?” In that regard, it’s too early to determine which technology looks and performs better. Initially, AMD seems to have an advantage in terms of potential performance gains, but NVIDIA DLSS may have an advantage in image quality. However, there is no truly reliable A / B comparison until you get a game title that supports both DLSS and FSR.

What about game developers adopting FSR?

This brings us to the question of supporting game titles. As of today, there are seven game titles that support AMD FSR: Godfall, The Rift Breaker, Anno 1800, Terminator Resistance, and, as mentioned above, some well-known titles like Far Cry. 6, DOTA 2, and Myst are coming in. Currently, there are a total of 19 games we are looking at, supporting FidelityFX Super Resolution. This is more than NVIDIA had when it first launched DLSS, but well below NVIDIA’s 50+. Game title library supported by DLSS Big names such as Doom Eternal, Rainbow Six Siege, and Red Dead Redemption 2 are now available.

Anyway, the open nature of the technology and the fact that it works on older GPU architectures dating back to the Radeon RX 400 and GeForce RTX 10 series will likely drive the adoption of powerful game developers in AMD FSR. .. It’s interesting to see AMD FSR studio partners such as EA, Unity, Valve and Ubisoft looking ahead weeks or months in hopes of deploying technology to the largest game engines on the market today. .. Gamers on both the green and red teams may be looking for a little gift of speed, courtesy of AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution.