Computex 2021 | AMD demos FidelityFX Super Resolution, slated to work on all GPUs including Navi 10, Polaris, Vega, and even NVIDIA Pascal
AMD's RDNA 2 launches so far proved to be great competitors to their NVIDIA counterparts, but they suffered from a major Achilles heel — lack of a worthy alternative to NVIDIA's much-acclaimed deep learning super sampling (DLSS) technology. For long, AMD has been indicating that it plans to offer a truly open-source upscaling implementation that will have broad applicability. All that is now official with the launch of AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) come June 22. AMD said that it has built FidelityFX Super Resolution around three core principles — performance, image quality, and broad support.
Four quality presets
AMD didn't delve into the exact details of how FSR actually works. We will probably get to know that on June 22. However, it did confirm this technology does not require any tensor cores or dedicated deep learning hardware unlike the competition. According to AMD, FSR will offer four quality presets that include ultra quality, quality, balanced, and performance with ultra quality being as near to native resolution as possible.
AMD demonstrated the impact of these FSR modes only with Godfall wherein the game was shown running on a Radeon RX 6800 XT at 4K Epic preset with ray tracing enabled. This resulted in 49 fps in native with ultra quality FSR preset offering 78 fps and performance mode going up to 150 fps. AMD's short demo did indicate that the upscaling works without sacrificing much image quality, but it is hard to tell at this point whether AMD's implementation would result in artefacting similar to what plagued NVIDIA's DLSS 1.0 implementation.
Targeting broad availability — including Navi 10, Polaris, Vega, and Pascal
FidelityFX Super Resolution comes under AMD's GPUOpen set of technologies. This means it will be a free and open source solution for game developers. What's interesting here is that FSR would work not only on RDNA 2 GPUs but also on Navi 10, Vega, Polaris, and even NVIDIA cards! Eventually, we expect console hardware support as well.
AMD showed a short demo of Godfall running with FSR enabled on the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060, which is still one of the most popular cards on Steam. FSR apparently enabled a 41% higher fps on the GTX 1060 in quality mode. However, it is difficult to ascertain what exactly would be the impact on image quality. A close examination of the slide shared with the press, does indicate a somewhat reduced resolution, but it is too early to conclude. The good part, however, is that FSR would support all the aforementioned architectures right from day one.
Available June 22 with over 100 CPUs and GPUs support
FSR's results would obviously vary by game as it requires developers to explicitly enable this feature and is not something that can be performed in post. AMD has not disclosed which games would be supporting FSR but did indicate that over 10 studios and game engines will be offering this feature this year. More details about the technology can be expected to be made available on June 22.
Source(s)
AMD Press Brief
