AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution, or FSR, was announced today. FSR, which was announced earlier this month, seeks to create a high-resolution output image from a low-resolution source, improving performance without compromising image quality.
The functionality is now accessible in seven games, including 22 Racing Series, Anno 1800, Evil Genius 2, Godfall, Kingshunt, Terminator: Resistance, and The Riftbreaker, which were released today. DOTA 2, Far Cry 6, and Resident Evil Village will all get the functionality by the end of the year, according to AMD. More than 40 game developers have pledged support for the functionality, according to the business.
FSR is a spatial upscaling technique that employs a sophisticated edge reconstruction algorithm to evaluate characteristics in the source image and recreate them at a higher target resolution, followed by a sharpening step to enhance texture details and further improve quality. This procedure is used on top of the game’s current anti-aliasing solution, not in place of it. FSR also works on a single frame at a time and does not use previous frames’ temporal information or motion vectors.
This is where AMD’s FSR and Nvidia’s DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) differ significantly. DLSS makes use of temporal data and motion vectors, as well as an, AI to perform the final image reconstruction. Nvidia achieves this as well, using dedicated tensor cores on the GPU, whereas AMD uses its compute units for all computations.
The goal is to take a lower-resolution input image and rebuild it into a higher-resolution output image in either instance. You could be playing a game on a 4K monitor with the output resolution set to 4K, for example. However, the game can internally render at 1080p and then produce a 4K image that looks similar to the output from a native 4K rendering using smart reconstruction technology like FSR or DLSS.
FSR offers four quality levels, including Ultra Quality, Quality, Balanced, and Performance, similar to DLSS. On each axis, the internal resolution is 1.3x, 1.5x, 1.7x, and 2.0x lower than the output resolution with each of these presets. If your output resolution is 4K (3840×2160), Ultra Quality will render at 2954×1662, Quality will render at 2560×1440, Balanced will render at 2259×1270, and Performance will render at 1920×1080. Your internal rendering slows down as your output resolution drops. Performance mode will render at 960×540 internally if your output resolution is 1920×1080.
The image quality will deteriorate as the resolution is reduced since the reconstruction algorithm will have fewer data to work with.
FSR has a number of advantages to DLSS, one of which is that it is an open-source technique. This gives developers the freedom to include it into their game or game engine. More crucially, the technology may be used with nearly any piece of hardware from any manufacturer, including Nvidia and Intel. This means that games using FSR will let you use an Nvidia graphics card or even an Intel onboard graphics solution to enable the feature (or their upcoming discrete cards).
There are a plethora of films available that demonstrate the technology in action, and we’ve included a few links above. FSR is still in its early stages, as it is still in version 1.0, and we can expect it to improve in the future. However, adoption by the game industry is a higher priority, as Nvidia has a significant head start in this area. At this time, DLSS is not only available in dozens of games, but it’s also built into prominent game engines like Unreal and Unity. Before AMD catches up, it will have to fight an uphill struggle.
SOURCE: AMD