AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) was announced last night.
FSR is AMD’s answer to DLSS. It does anti-aliasing, upscaling, and improves framerates. And there
are different modes depending on which balance of those things you want.
They’ve even named the modes similarly to Nvidia’s DLSS, only with everything named
one tier along instead. Instead of Ultra Performance, they have ‘Performance’. And on the other
end, instead of ‘Quality’ setting, they have ‘Ultra Quality’. Which is going to
really confuse things when it’s compared to DLSS! In the demonstration, FSR’s ‘Performance
Mode’ was seen to triple framerates, but officially they only claim ‘more than 2x
performance at its fastest setting’
…And then 2.5x performance on their website.
UNFORTUNATELY, FSR, like DLSS, requires developers to implement it into their games, so it isn’t
something that simply can be enabled in any title you wish. Which is a shame. I know a
lot of people -including myself- were quietly hoping that AMD would have discovered a clever
way to get it working in lots of new and old titles automatically, since this would have
been easier for AMD to maintain in the long-run, AND because automatic support would have excused
any short-comings with the technology itself. But since it needs to be supported on a per-game
basis, it has put itself in direct competition with DLSS and will likely require more of
AMD’s (and developers’) time to keep on top of it and to ensure supported games are
released for it from this moment onwards. So how many games will support FSR? So far
they claim that ‘over 10 game studios and engines’ in 2021 will implement it. That’s
this year, and not come FSR’s release day. If these 10 things are singular games then
it doesn’t sound like much, but if a few key engines like Unreal or Unity are among
those that are supported then that’s very hopeful indeed, as this should enable easy
support in many future titles. Right now, DLSS is already supported in about
50 titles, so AMD has some catching up to do.
I’ve compared FSR with DLSS a lot because they are very similar, and it’s the logical
comparison to make. But there are some important ways in which it’s different. For a start,
ANY modern card can use this- DLSS is limited to RTX cards, but FSR supports most modern
cards, going back as far as AMD’s older Vega and Polaris generations, and on the Nvidia
side of things, as far back as the 1000 series, so any users still struggling by on a Geforce
1060 or Radeon 570 can rejoice. This could help to double your framerates! He even mentions
support for APUs, like my Ryzen 2200G. Which is extremely exciting indeed- right now, these
systems are limping along in modern titles, but FSR could enable smooth performance at
acceptable image qualities on these systems which are most in need of a performance boost,
so I see Ryzen APUs as the perfect match for a technology like FSR.
And this is kind of how it’s being marketed. DLSS is mostly marketed by Nvidia to enable
raytracing at higher resolutions. But FSR is marketed by AMD, less about the raytracing,
and more about its potential just to supercharge performance, and I don’t think it’s any
coincidence that this announcement coincides with their unveiling of the RX 6000 series
of mobile graphics cards. Laptops typically have smaller screens with higher pixel densities,
so FSR is great on devices such as these as any small drop in image quality will be masked,
while the performance gains will be greatly appreciated.
So that’s all well and good. But how good IS FSR? AMD teased a few comparison videos
which I shall attempt to analyse. Disclaimer: we won’t know for sure until it’s released,
since these comparisons were done on Youtube, with a low bitrate. And were hand-picked by
AMD themselves. HOWEVER, I still spotted a thing or two from them that I’d like to
share with you.
The first one I’ll cover is the Geforce 1060 comparison. Why they chose to showcase
it running on an Nvidia card is anyone’s guess- it could be to throw shade at DLSS
for not supporting the card, or it could be to hide AMD’s performance with the technology
until release day, or to let Nvidia’s card absorb any criticism about the technology.
But I will say that I found the result to be blurry. VERY blurry. Sure, it removes aliasing.
But it also strips the textures of their clarity, and the edges of their definition. This is
‘Quality’ mode of FSR, so it isn’t the best ‘Ultra Quality’ setting… but with
2 modes below it I’d still expect this one to produce a decent image. But alas, it comes
with drawbacks. In fact, for a 41% framerate improvement I don’t think it’s worth it.
I’d rather just run the game at 1080p instead, or drop a few graphics settings. Perhaps FSR
could be used in conjunction with AMD’s sharpening tools to reclaim some definition-
I certainly notice that Cyberpunk is made too soft with DLSS for my liking, but with
sharpening over the top it can look significantly crisper, in exchange for a bit more image
noise. This demonstration of FSR looks kind of like
how DLSS 1.0 looked, especially on the leaves of the trees. DLSS 1.0 was rightly ridiculed
in titles such as Battlefield 5, where it blurred stuff so badly that it was better
just to drop the resolution and to sharpen the image instead. And this is concerning
to me because we know that FSR doesn’t use motion vectors, which I believe DLSS 2 greatly
relies upon to clear the image up and to carry as much information forward to the next frame
as possible. Without these, FSR sounds like it’s more similar to how DLSS 1.0 worked.
Don’t get me wrong, you can still get great results without motion vectors- consoles using
checkerboard rendering have proven this. But this particular example of FSR didn’t really
impress me too much. Admittedly, both sides of the comparison have a lot of motion blur,
which masks the details I care most about, but I could still make out some interesting
details. The native 1440p side uses temporal anti-aliasing and you can make out long streaks
behind details. I spotted a few instances of this on the FSR side, but it was less pronounced.
Probably because the whole thing was already blurred into oblivion.
I also noticed some of ‘jitter’ around some of the objects on the native side of
things. This can be used to fade between different model LODs, but it can also be a sign that
checkerboard rendering is being used. I can’t imagine that AMD would compare their upscaling
solution to a game that’s already using upscaling? But it was a curious detail that
I spotted in this comparison.
So I can’t say I was impressed with the 1440p example they showed. But they also provided
a 4K demonstration, on a powerful 6800 XT. 4K is a better fit for FSR since every pixel
is ‘worth less’, giving FSR trickery more leeway to work with.
So not only is this at higher resolution, but it’s now using FSR’s best ‘Ultra
Quality’ setting. And the result certainly looks still looks crisper and clearer than
the 1440p demonstration did. If I pause and zoom in on the textures, it reveals quite
a big drop in clarity over native. The details on those stalky things have been blurred,
but maybe this could pass as ‘cinematic anti-aliasing’. Unfortunately any analysis
beyond that is swallowed up by Youtube’s bitrate.
And finally, a comparison between all 4 different FSR modes. Ultra quality runs 50% faster than
native, Quality runs 100% faster, and Performance runs 200% faster.
Unfortunately, I have very little to say about this comparison because we’re really being
hamstrung by Youtube’s bitrate here, and the sections are so thin and different here
that it isn’t fair to compare them, with the scene to the right getting darker and
with less foreground detail any way. But if Performance FSR is anything like Nvidia’s
Ultra Performance DLSS mode, then it’s to be reserved for resolutions greater than 4K
any way.
So that’s it! A great step in the right direction for AMD, who have gone from having
nothing, to having an all-round answer to Nvidia’s DLSS. Given the state of the market
right now, and with FSR’s support for older generations of cards, for PC gamers this could
be the most exciting announcement of the year.