With GeForce RTX cards, you have the option of using DLSS upscaling, which significantly increases the frame rate as rendering runs at a reduced resolution and therefore has lower performance requirements. It’s been announced that AMD is also planning an alternative for Radeon graphics cards called FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR). A claim has shown up that the release could be closer than expected, perhaps as early as next month.
Last month, AMD released a major driver update 21.4.1, but FSR was not yet part of it. On the contrary, it was claimed this feature will have to wait until the end of the year. A YouTuber going by the nick Coreteks now claims that FidelityFX Super Resolution has made significant progress and the technology is already said to be in the hands of game developers. And it should reportedly be released soon, perhaps even during the next month (June). That would be much earlier than previous indications suggested. It is unclear how credible the claims of this YouTuber are, but he has reportedly been told this by several sources (perhaps from the circle of game developers with whom AMD is likely supposed to be working on this matter).
According to Coreteks, the performance looks good, but that can mean more or less anything and no specific numbers or some comparisons with DLSS are offered. In addition, it must be said that just the performance data tells us nothing if we do not know what sort of impact on image quality will be involved.
FSR is said to not require too much work from developers to integrate in a game, nor does it require training for each particular game. A bit strange is the claim that this technology is implemented at an earlier stage of the graphics pipeline than DLSS, which runs more or less as post-processing at its end. Due to the fact that DLSS works with finished frames (bitmaps), neural network-based upscaling is well applicable. This approach should just be easier to integrate into the game, while placing it at some earlier stage of rendering should be more complicated, not less. We’ll likely learn later what the deal is (I wonder if AMD uses something like the recently released Radeon Boost feature that is based on variable-rate shading, instead of upscaling entire frames).
Conventional upscaling instead of neural network?
Another thing Coreteks mentions is that the FSR uses “algorithmic supersampling” for upscaling from a lower resolution, which is said to have very little impact on performance. Again, it’s hard to say how much to trust this information, but if it’s not misinterpreted, it could mean that the upscaler would not be based on a neural network (“AI”), but rather on some conventional interpolation algorithm that achieves high performance when implemented on GPU shaders.
One disadvantage of such an approach could be the lower quality and sharpness of the upscaling. But in theory, there could also be advantages, as AI upscaling also introduces its own type of artifacts or problems with loss of detail (blur) in textures. In general, however, we should probably expect lower image quality from FSR compared to DLSS 2.0 as it likely uses simpler upscaling. But it will also depend on whether AMD also uses temporal stabilisation, which is also very important (if not more important) part of DLSS 2.x. And this is something Coreteks’ information doesn’t touch upon.
Read more: A look at Nvidia DXR, Broadcast App and the visual quality of DLSS
FSR to run on graphics cards of other brands too
FSR upscaling will be part of the FidelityFX libraries and graphic components and effects for games. According to Coreteks, however, FSR should be supported not just on AMD graphics, but should also be compatible with GPUs from Nvidia (and therefore also likely from Intel). However, this is not entirely surprising given how AMD seems to be using conventional shaders and not some special units like Nvidia does in DLSS. If a game already supports both DLSS and FSR, it can be expected that GeForce users will likely choose upscaling from Nvidia.
For developers, however, the universal support of FSR and broad compatibility could be attractive. This way, some of them might be discouraged by AMD from implementing DLSS, which only works on one brand – that is, to decide to handle upscaling speedup features by FSR only because it will cover all graphics cards with one technology.
Take this information with a grain of salt for now. In particular, the claim that AMD will launch this technology next month looks pretty bold. On the other hand, if the development has been ongoing for some time even before the first announcement was made in October last year, this perhaps isn’t completely impossible. Computex 2021 will take place (online only) at the turn of May and June and AMD will once again present its new products there. It is one of the two most watched hardware “events” of the year (with CES), so it would make sense to present a similar novelty during the exhibition or during AMD’s keynote. The E3 gaming expo takes place later in June and could possibly play the same role.
It should be added, however, that the announcement or reveal of the FidelityFX Super Resolution technology at one of these events may not be the same as launching. A technology like this is often at first demonstrated or announced only in the form of previews, demonstrations and “promises”, while actual appearance in games takes more time, e.g. only happens several months later. Therefore, although we may find out about this novelty in June, the story that it will not be available to users until the end of the year may prove true at the same time. After all, DLSS was announced several months in advance before the first game to support it appeared (Battlefield V), so this might actually be the scenario we should be expecting from the very beginning…
Source: VideoCardz
Translated, original text by:
Jan Olšan, editor for Cnews.cz
