The upscaling wars rage on, and AMD now has a new weapon in its own arsenal for assisting
in the ever pursuit of increased frame rates. So today I’m going to take a brief look at the latest
from team red: Radeon Super Resolution. And you’re going to find out what it is
and what it is not, how to enable it if you’ve got the hardware to support it,
how it performs, and an idea of how games look while using it.
Want to know more? Let’s get into it.
Radeon Super Resolution or RSR is the latest from AMD in its arsenal of upscaling technologies.
But Keith, what about FidelityFX Super Resolution, or FSR? Well,
that’s still very much a thing and if it’s available, use it over RSR as
FSR will be the BETTER of the two options. If you’re not up to speed on FSR hit the card in
the upper right-hand corner to learn more about it and other upscaling technologies.
Okay, back to focusing on RSR and what it is. Honestly, the long and short is
it’s a driver-level implementation of the spacial upscaler technology used in FSR that
doesn’t require specific game integration. This means it works across many titles,
though it does require exclusive full-screen support to work, so that will be the catch. Oh,
it also requires a Radeon RX 5000 Series or current RX 6000 Series graphics card.
The upside is that you get access to a great spatial upscaler
that allows you to run a sub-native render resolution that would, in theory,
allow your game to operate at a higher frame rate and improve performance.
But at what cost? There’s always a catch, right? Well, FSR operates at the game level,
and that allows the game to retain a lot of the features at native resolution,
like the HUD and post-processing effects. But RSR simply relies on the actual resolution for
everything to then upscale back to the native target of the screen.
So the HUD elements and the post-processing effects are subject to reduced fidelity.
Well, that’s enough of that now just how do you enable it? Well, you’re going to need the latest
AMD Software Adrenaline Edition. That’s right it’s no longer Radeon Software Adrenaline Edition as
AMD has incorporated so many features for the CPU into the mix, it is now all-encompassing.
Anyway, simply open up the software by right-clicking on the desktop,
navigating to the global graphics tab. Click ‘enable’ on the Radeon Super Resolution tab.
That's it!
The first time you do this AMD has graciously added a short tutorial
on how to use it. It’s so incredibly easy you might not think it’s right.
Seriously, just enable RSR, make sure your game is in exclusive fullscreen mode,
reduce the resolution, and it works on its own. That’s it. That’s the whole process.
Now to ensure it’s actually working, just use the ALT+R command while in your game to bring up the
AMD Overlay and look for the green check on Radeon Super Resolution and you know you’re in business.
I want to take an extremely quick look at frame rate performance. To do so I threw the Radeon
RX 6700XT on my MSI X570 Unify motherboard with 32GB of DDR4 3600 with a Ryzen 5 3600X.
Now performance should be obvious here that there’s a steady uplift in performance as the
render resolution drops. Remember, RSR is only upscaling, so the Native 4K results are the base
and what kind of performance increase you get as you lower the resolution
is normal. All of these results render at full 4K upscaled resolution on your screen, to be clear.
So essentially we’re looking at performance scaling related to resolutions for the RX 6700XT.
Cyberpunk 2077 on the High preset without ray tracing
shows dropping from from 4K to 1440p is what’s needed to get across that 60 FPS barrier,
The same can be said for Shadow of the Tomb Raider with 1440p just topping that 60 FPS mark,
admittedly this time is with the settings maxed out including ray tracing on Ultra.
The last game I looked at, performance wise, is Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
It only needed to go down to 1800p in order to break the 60 FPS wall, and that’s with Very
High settings too. So if you’re hoping to hit 60 FPS then there’s no need to go any lower.
Okay Keith, I get it, lower resolution results in higher frames, duh. But how does it look?
For an image comparison, in motion, because remember folks that’s how we play games in motion,
I recorded the benchmark run from Cyberpunk 2077 and with a 4K target running 1440p with RSR on,
it looked pretty dang good compared to Native. I even played the game for a
while and it didn’t take long for me to forget that I had even tampered with the resolution.
Edges were pretty sharp. Admittedly if I zoomed into specific scenes I could tell
but that’s pixel peeping and while it’s all fine and good, that’s not the point of RSR.
So at the end of the day Radeon Super Resolution is the end all be all right?
Nah, not quite. FSR is still the much better option with game integration it has,
but it’s not in all games, or nearly as many as RSR can support. If a game already has FSR,
don’t bother with RSR as the in-game option WILL be better. And you’re going to need a more
modern Radeon graphics card to run it, so RX 5000 Series or newer—sorry Polaris and Vega hold outs.
FSR is still holding itself down but having RSR as an option when the game doesn’t have
anything else is very nice to have. It’s good tool in Radeon’s bag of tricks.
If you’re planning on using or, after the new driver goes live, are using this then let me
know how if this is something that excites you or are even interested in anything that isn’t native
resolution. While you’re down there in the comment section hit that like button and make
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