AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution Tested!

AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution feature is here, with the company promising a high-quality upscaling technique that not only looks good, but offers significant improvements to your frame rate. We put this to the test in game, giving you a detailed look at the image quality and performance on offer…

Timestamps:

00:00 Video start
00:15 Introduction and how it works
02:19 Godfall: 4K image quality
05:59 Godfall: 4K performance benchmarks
06:39 Godfall: 1080p image quality
07:45 Godfall: 1080p performance benchmarks
08:18 Anno 1800: 4K image quality
10:15 Anno 1800: 4K performance benchmarks
10:47 Terminator Resistance: 4K image quality
12:19 Terminator Resistance: 1080p image quality
13:12 Terminator Resistance: 4K performance benchmarks
13:53 Wrapping up

For a brief overview as to how FidelityFX Super Resolution, known as FSR, works in practice, in-game you will be presented with four different options – Ultra Quality, Quality, Balanced and Performance. Each of these modes renders the game image at a different internal resolution, with Ultra Quality mode using a 77% render scale, Quality mode using a 67% render scale and so on.

While AMD didn't go into specifics as to the inner workings of the technology, FSR takes the game image at that lower-than-native render resolution, and then applies both its upscaling algorithm and a sharpening pass at the same time, to output at the target resolution. It’s key to point out this is done using a spatial upscaling process, so there's no machine learning, and the process is entirely shader based which is why it can work on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs going back several years. It’s also not a temporal solution, and as the FSR pass occurs after the image has been anti-aliased in the graphics pipeline, it can work with any form of AA.

As of today 22nd June, FSR is available in the seven games as shown above, with a few more promised to be ‘coming soon.' It would be easy to criticise AMD here as, in my opinion, the current list of supported games is lacking a killer title. Yes, Far Cry 6 and Resident Evil Village are promised have to FSR support, but we're really unsure of the time frame there.

Balanced against that, when Nvidia's DLSS technology first launched, it only made its way to a handful of games over several months, and as we know, DLSS 1.0 wasn't very good to being with. In that regard, I think it's only fair to give AMD some time here, and hopefully its extensive list of ‘FSR studio partners' can deliver the goods.

As of 22nd June 2021, FSR is supported on the following hardware:

• Radeon RX 6000/6000M series
• Radeon RX 5000/5000M series
• Radeon RX Vega series
• Radeon RX 500 series
• Radeon RX 480/470/460
• Ryzen 2000 series processors with Radeon graphics and newer
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 30 series
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 20 series
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 10/16 series

That's it for this brief explainer though, and be sure to watch the video above for all the side-by-side image quality comparisons and the performance numbers!

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KitGuru says: Will you be enabling FSR in any of the supported games this week? Let us know your thoughts on the technology.

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