- You want a faster GPU.
How do you get one?
(man crying)
Well, instead of turning your air conditioning
into a chiller, AMD wants you to fiddle with the settings?
Uh, yeah.
According to them, you can get 40%
more performance out of your existing hardware
without spending a dime, and AMD sponsored this video
so that we could go through their numbers
and explain to you how to do it.
(upbeat music)
All right, let's imagine you're AMD
and you're trying to make the next fastest GPU in the world.
What do you do?
Well, in the past you leaned on two things
to increase your performance,
more transistors, and if that didn't work, more power.
The problem is, adding more transistors
and power will be impossible
unless you wanna enter big dumb territory at this point.
Right now, high-end GPUs draw close to 500 watts.
You know what also draws 500 watts?
This 500-watt space heater.
- Unlike Linus, my computer room isn't very big,
so in the summer I have to seriously undervolt
my system to avoid poaching in my own sweat.
Until I move, there's just no way
that I'm buying a card with an over 350-watt TDP,
and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
- Even if the raw heat output isn't a problem,
people in the office have actually heated
their homes by mining in the winter,
so I guess it's a feature, not a bug,
in North America, we've got garbage 120-volt power
out of most of our outlets, meaning that,
for a single circuit, you can get 1,800 watts max.
We're actually getting close to the point
where desktops will need a dedicated circuit.
Like forget plugging in a blender
or a vacuum on the same circuit as your PC.
Now, in Europe they use 240-volt power,
so overloading a circuit is less of a problem for them.
However, European wars have been pretty bad
for energy prices lately,
and they've gone from high to absolutely insane.
If GPUs get any more power-hungry,
it could get to the point where,
around a freaking war zone,
it's gonna noticeably affect your power bill.
All right, so if we can't feasibly add more power,
then we're gonna need more transistors,
and this is typically accomplished
by physically shrinking the transistors.
I'm sure you're familiar, by now,
with terms like 12-nanometer, 7-nanometer,
5-nanometer, and so on and so forth.
The problem is that the cost
of developing new process nodes has gone
from very expensive to oh, my god, that's a lot of money!
Now, to be clear, chip makers are willing
to make those investments,
but the process nodes are gonna start sticking
around for longer to ensure that they get a return.
AMD was able to get around this a bit
by switching to 3D chip-stacking in the 5800X3D,
and I'm sure we'll be seeing way more 3D chip architectures
in the future, but that still isn't gonna help
us completely break the laws of physics.
We are getting scary close to the point where,
if you make transistors smaller,
quantum tunneling becomes a big problem.
Now, I'm gonna pretend
to fully understand quantum tunneling,
but basically if the transistors are too small,
the electrons will sometimes just (pops mouth)
pass straight through.
Have that happen a couple of times
and Mr. Blue Screen is gonna be paying you a visit.
All of this is to say, then, that,
in the future, we're gonna have to make games run faster
by working smarter rather than harder,
and the first way that AMD's doing this is
with Smart Access Memory, or SAM.
The TL, didn't watch about SAM is that,
if you have an AMD CPU and a GPU,
go enable it right now,
and you could get a 5- to 10% performance improvement
in many games.
How did AMD do this?
Well, in the past, a CPU could only access 256 megabytes
of the GPU's VRAM at a time, which was fine back
when you were sneakily watching Newgrounds
on the school computers.
But in 2022 your CPU should be able to access gigabytes
of VRAM at a time, and with Smart Access Memory,
you can do just that.
To enable Smart Access Memory,
simply hop into the BIOS, make a detour
to make sure that D.O.C.P. is enabled, by the way,
that's a Tech Tip, and then click this button,
right up here, that says, "Resize BAR."
I don't know how common this button is,
so you might have to head over to Advanced mode.
Go to Advanced, PCI Subsystem Settings,
and enable Above 4G Decoding,
then set Resize BAR Support to auto,
and boom, now your games run faster
and you didn't have to spend any money.
You can celebrate by picking up
this swacket at lttstore.com.
Now, Sam might've been able to get Frodo
to Mount Doom, nice joke, I love it, by the way (chuckles),
but it might not be enough to get
you the frame rates that you're looking for.
That's where FidelityFX Super Resolution
and Radeon Super Resolution come in.
They're both essentially the same idea,
except that FSR is optimized for specific games
and leaves HUD elements at native resolution,
while RSR is implemented in the drivers
and can be used on any game.
We'll be using FSR for the rest of the video
unless I'm specifically talking about RSR.
Basically what FSR does is render the game
at a lower resolution, then use a combination
of AI and sharpening to fill back in the lost pixels.
This can give you a massive increase in performance,
like 10- to 50%, depending on your settings.
But it does come with the caveat
that you're going to be decreasing image quality.
The question is by how much?
And this is where I'd like to shout-out AMD for a second.
Typically for this kind of testing
I would just set up a single computer
and only test on that.
But AMD actually sent us over three systems
to target three different popular gaming resolutions,
and the results between the different resolutions tell
a really interesting story.
First of all, at 1080p, you should only use FSR
or RSR if you absolutely have to.
Even slight downgrades in resolution can lead
to an image that's softer than 10-ply toilet paper.
So if you need that extra 20% of performance,
you should try and get it by dropping the in-game settings
rather than enabling FSR.
I'll put some examples on the screen,
but realistically, YouTube compression's gonna have
its day with it, so unless you're subscribed on Floatplane,
this might not be that meaningful to you.
At 1440p, however, it's more of a mixed bag,
depending on the game.
"Assassin's Creed: Valhalla", for example,
looks great with RSR enabled,
with a nearly imperceptible loss in image quality
during the majority of your gameplay.
"Tiny Tina's Wonderland", and "Horizon: Zero Dawn" are
less favorable due to how FSR works, however.
"Tiny Tina's Wonderland", a "Borderlands" offshoot,
has hard black lines around basically everything,
which can become a nightmare for aliasing,
and in a lotta situations, can end up looking worse
than if you didn't enable it at all.
"Horizon: Zero Dawn", on the other hand,
has everything close to the player looking great,
but the benchmark has a lot of stone textures
that can start looking a little strange in the distance.
FSR can have some trouble deciding
what to do with a line about a pixel thick
when it's upscaling, and this is especially true
if it's on a moving objects, and this is especially-er true
at lower quality settings.
Should that pixel be light?
Should it be dark?
It's hard to say, given the amount of information
that it has to go off of.
This is compounded by the fact
that FSR 1.0 has no temporal component.
It just sees the frame as it is
with no knowledge of what came before
or what is expected to come after,
which can lead to shimmering, like I mentioned before,
where a pixel with a fine black line can
actually change from light to dark, frame by frame.
AMD knows, however, that the lack
of temporal information is a problem
with FSR 1.0 compared to its competitors,
and they've actually included temporal information
in the recently-released FSR 2.0.
That tech looks really promising,
based on the small amount of testing that I've seen,
but currently it's not supported in many games,
unlike RSR, that can be enabled for any title
through Radeon software.
Back to testing, 4K is where FSR 1.0 really seems
to come into its own.
Here we've got enough pixels that
even a 6950 XT sometimes struggles
to keep frame rates high if you also wanna turn
up your details, and FSR is getting
enough pixels in to spit a good image out.
My complaints in "Tiny Tina's Wonderland"
and "Horizon: Zero Dawn" are basically gone,
with the small lines and textures getting rendered
with almost zero weirdness, and while,
if you're really looking for it,
you might be able to find some shimmering in the distance,
you'd have to be playing one hell
of an unimmersive game for you to be distracted enough
by it to notice anything going wrong.
My main takeaways, though,
are that you should absolutely enable Smart Access Memory,
and if you're gaming at 1440p or 4K,
at least give FSR a try.
It works on AMD and Nvidia GPUs,
I mean, heck, even Intel integrated ones,
so if your poor older GPU is struggling
this could be a way to claw back some frames.
It's probably a lot better than letting
your monitor do the upscaling, that's for sure.
So a huge thanks to AMD for sponsoring this video.
If you guys enjoyed it, maybe go check out
our Play Button PC.
Really, that's an odd one to throw to.
- [Man Off-Screen] It's a good video.
- It's a good video.
Go check it out.