there's a little program called magpie that allows you to use amd's upscaling technology fsr in star
citizen and this video is all about whether that is worth doing does it bring big performance
improvements let's see okay so let's just quickly show you how to get magpie hooked up you have to
set your graphics settings to be a windowed window and then it's as simple as choosing a resolution
i've gone for 720p to upscale from you extract all this magpie stuff there's guides on youtube i'll
link to some of them and here is the little magpie settings window so hitting fsr video capture there
and then i can't read mandarin but this is apparently what you click on you can use of 11 to
kind of turn it on or you can hit that button and then after five seconds it will send everything
full screen and there it's working the uh the downside is it doesn't seem that big a deal
is that there seems to be two curses but actually once you're in game that's not a factor we're
going to do some image quality comparison between 10 hp 720p and fsr 720p upscale to 1080p if that
makes any sense i did try and do this video but ultimately he couldn't really see enough and this
uh online image comparison tool allows you to zoom right in so first of all this is a 720p image this
is the upscale version can you see much difference depends probably on what size screen you're on
i'm gonna say you might be able to see that it's a bit sharper on the upscaled one if you look around
here it looks a bit blurry hard to see but luckily this tool has ability to zoom in and this is where
we can really see some sort of difference so if i kind of scroll or swipe across from the left
right if you're looking down here at the detail and just the general pixelation on the 720p image
the upscaled version is much smoother so if you look at the sign here it's just you can see that
the some of the pixelation has been sorted out you look at the spinning globe thing again less
pixelation smoother softer it's generally it is better so the upscaling is definitely
doing something and yeah you would say from that that it's doing its job let's then compare it to
the full 1080p native image so again we'll just do some across like that that's the 1080p image
and then if you swap across to the fsr upscale version can you tell anything at that
size probably not if you look closely in here we'll look at this bit more you can probably
see that the 10xp is much it's sharper and that is generally the story we're going to get to so
again look at the sign look at the medical unit this is the full hd version the 1080p and then
as we go to the fsr the upscaled 1080p version you lose detail so it's softer and to be to be fair
it's doing a good job but it it's nowhere near as much detail and if you look here at the zone three
uh text there right in the background as you swap over to the fsr image it definitely loses
some definition the the globe is still uh it still looks about the same really in terms of the pixels
it's definitely it's not far off but just again if you it's just generally softer image it's not
quite as clear and the the 1080p image definitely gets the win in my book into some benchmarks
and it's worth saying that all this testing has been done with my minimum spec pc setup
which has got an i5 8400 which is a very mediocre cpu as well as a 1066 gigabyte gpu
now the reason for that is that fsr really only applies when your gpu is struggling there's no
point doing this with my 3080 just the results would not there would be nothing interesting
whatsoever so all this testing has been done with that and actually probably the lower the gpu the
better when it comes to fsr but anyway the testing here there's no real difference because at area 18
as we as we know we are really cpu bottlenecks so even though fsr is applied there's a drop in
gpu load on fsr compared to the 1080p native result but no real improvement in performance
next up wally's bar on microtech and here is our first pretty decent result we've gone
to 24.5 fps versus 19.4 and that is good we'll take that every day wellies bar is
is despite microsoft being pretty cpu limited as most cities are wally's bar actually pushes the
gpu off this level of a 1060 level pretty hard so yes we will take that result that's pretty good
here we are calliope one of the moons and you'll see a good improvement in performance again
and really the moons they don't have much going on for the cpu so cpu load is quite
low but actually in kelly op's case the weather effects are quite heavy on a gpu especially a
low end gpu like the 1060. so yeah that is a good result again okay and getting to some of the more
extreme results i'm not going to do all the normal tests because some of the errors like laureville
there's no real point doing because it's really cpu bound but in these ones we are seeing some
big improvements look at this that's a huge improvement and obviously nothing's really
going on again this is an area looking down at the planet where there's not much going on for
the cpu at all quantum travel another area of the game that relatively pushes the gpu pretty hard
and again big increase in performance very very nice and we'll move on to the last result now
which i've had a bit of an extended look at horizon okay so here we are and i've
had a more of an extensive look here at horizon because the cloud tech is really heavy on a gpu
and this really does show how fsr can help you out especially in this sort of area of the game so if
we look at the results we've got clear scaling as go from very high to high to medium on the
1080p results we know that before but we also know that medium doesn't look particularly great
so there's a lot more kind of artifacting going on if you could stay off medium you'd really want to
so it's quite interesting to see then that high clouds with fsr on is kind of
approaching the same result as as 1080p with the medium flats and for me i think every day of the
week i probably go for the fsr with high clouds there because as i say medium just doesn't look
good at all so what to make of all this well i think there's two elements to this really
there is pitch quality and there's performance and on the performance side of things you have to say
when you're not cpu bottlenecked which a lot of people will be in most areas of the game
but when you are actually gpu without an x like we saw uh when we were looking at the art called
planet or when we were in quantum travel we saw pretty substantial increases in performance and
who is going to complain about that especially with star citizen so in those scenarios with
lower end gpus like the 1066 gigabyte or lower you've got to say this this is great like this
is brilliant and and really in an ideal world star citizen would have this technology embedded into
the engine as soon as possible i don't think that's gonna happen but you never know cig and
amd might get together and just whip it in it's open i think it's out there now for anybody to
mess around with so hopefully that will happen that's the performance side it does work when
you're not cpu bottlenecked when your gpu box out it can definitely bring performance improvements
the other question is then picture quality and we looked at the screenshots before and we saw
that there is definitely something going on something's happening uh you can see that
the upscaling technology is definitely smoothing things out maybe too smooth maybe too soft in in
most people's opinion i would say because when i was playing the game when you look at the
screenshot you're really zoomed in you can see what's going on but when i was playing the game
i would say that the fsr 720p up to 1080p i'm just going that was going on
it looked closer in my opinion to 720p native than it did 1080p netting so if you could run at 1080p
you'd want to do that for the pitch quality but again we're talking about people with lower
end gpus who can be using this we're talking about people with maybe what have i tested the
the 460 the rx 460 or anything like that maybe even things like the 970 where you're where you're
dropping below the performance maybe over the 1066 gigabyte you are probably then in desperate need
of the extra frames if you can get them on the gpu side so if that's where you are and you're
happy to take the security risk that comes with downloading some random software that that you
don't know where it's from on the internet there's always a risk for that if you're happy to do that
i would recommend downloading this and giving it a go because yes there does seem to be performance
to be had from this technology which again who's going to complain about
so there we go that about sums it up if you like this more technical look at star citizen
i love you to subscribe give the video a like if you like this one and i will see you soon bye