At GDC last week, AMD shared some more official details about FSR 3, the next generation of its upscaling technology. FSR 3 is still in early development, but AMD has some lofty goals for the new version, including a 2x frame rate improvement over FSR 2.
Stephan Hodes, a Core Technology Group engineer, started his presentation at GDC 2023 by talking about FidelityFX Super Resolution technologies, with a particular emphasis on temporal upscaling. Starting with FSR 1 and moving to FSR 2, he shared not just the initial development of these technologies but also talked about how FSR 2.1 and FSR 2.2 solved some issues presented by the first two implementations of the upscaling tech.
As AMD explains, FSR 2 computes more pixels than we have samples in the current frame. However, it's possible to render even more pixes using interpolated frames. That's where FSR 3 comes in, allowing the upcoming version of the red team's upscaling technique to double the framerate in some cases.
Still, some challenges have to be conquered to achieve this. First, FSR 3 can't rely on colour clamping to adjust the colour of old samples. Additionally, non-linear motion interpolation is complex with 2D screen space motion vectors, so AMD recommends an input of at least 60FPS. Lastly, if the final frames are interpolated, the UI and any post-processing must also be. There's a good chance that every interpolated pixel will have at least one sample. Moreover, there's no feedback loop because the interpolated frame will only be presented once – any interpolation artefacts will only be seen for one frame.
Another point touched on during the presentation was latency. Moving from FSR to FSR 2, framerate gains were increased while latency decreased. Applying frame interpolation boosts framerate as well as latency. As a result, FSR 3 will depend on latency reduction techniques. Furthermore, FSR 3 will combine resolution upscaling with frame interpolation to make it easier to implement FSR 3 on FSR 2 titles. In addition, to better facilitate integration, FSR 3 is intended to be open-source like other FidelityFX technologies.
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KitGuru says: Do you think FSR 3 will compete well up against DLSS 3?