AMD enables certain RDNA2 FidelityFX features on Xbox Series X/S, nothing for PS5 yet
While AMD’s DLSS-like FidelityFX Super Resolution feature is probably going to take some more months to polish and release, Team Red is at least making progress with the cross-platform implementation for RDNA2 graphics, as it now offers certain FidelityFX enhancements for the Xbox Series X/S consoles.
AMD announced during its recent Game Stack Live Keynote that select features from the FidelityFX suite such as Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS), Variable Shading, plus the ray-traced shadow Denoiser are now included in the latest Xbox Series X/S Game Developer Kit. AMD will most likely add more features in the coming months, and if all goes well, the Super Resolution feature could be launched for PCs and Xbox Series X/S consoles at the same time. Thanks to the new SDK, developers can enable more effects on the console side, making the games look and feel almost as detailed as the PC versions. With the addition of the FSR feature, consoles could also get a significant FPS boost to provide more fluid gameplay at higher resolutions, similar to how Nvidia's DLSS improves gameplay performance with ray tracing enabled.
The press release mentions that “developers [are] able to access select AMD FidelityFX effects with specific optimizations for Windows and Xbox,” so it is not yet clear what will happen to PS5. Since the Xbox OS is derived from the Windows code, Team Red probably found it easier to offer the cross-platform features to Xbox developers first. However, PS5 integrates an AMD RDNA2 GPU as well, so it should be compatible with most of the FidelityFX features, but the implementation may take a while longer because the PS5 OS is using different code.
