AMD's 'Super Resolution' DLSS competitor won't arrive at launch for its RX 6000 GPUs

[Polycount]

In a nutshell: Nvidia's deep learning supersampling (DLSS) technology got off to a rocky start when it first arrived, but it improved substantially with its second iteration, DLSS 2.0. Unfortunately, it might be a while before we see how solid AMD's alternative is. Though the Red Team's next-gen GPUs are set to release this month, the company will not release its supersampling tech until sometime after its cards launch.

This news might disappoint AMD fans, but it's worth noting that Nvidia's supersampling technology also took a few months to properly launch. The first RTX GPUs arrived in September 2018, but DLSS 1.0 didn't get any actual in-game implementations until February 2019.

Unfortunately for Nvidia fans at the time, the extra development time didn't lead to a better initial product. Still, the case may well be different for AMD -- the company has the benefit of being second to market, after all, which means it could learn from Nvidia's mistakes here.

Regardless, AMD's supersampling implementation, aptly called "Super Resolution," will be much more accessible to general consumers than DLSS itself. Whereas DLSS is locked down and available only on RTX cards, Super Resolution will be both "open" and "cross-platform."

We don't know exactly what that will mean in practical terms, but it seems likely that next-gen consoles -- which are powered by AMD GPUs -- could receive the feature at some point.

At any rate, even without Super Resolution's day-one availability, AMD's Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs are looking fairly promising so far -- at least, if the company's own internal benchmarks can be trusted.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/87426-amd-uper-resolution-dlss-competitor-wont-arrive-launch.html

 

[dangh]

Looking forward for an open standard which would benefit everyone. Right now only about 30-40 games support DLSS and that is not enough to convince me to get nVidia, I probably will go with new AMD gpu as I'd like to support the open approach to new features and I'm happy with the performance.
Still, I think the AMD will show something better next year. After getting more money from CPU division the GPU engineers can afford more talents and focus on their job. And they actually do not have to help CPU guys anymore AMD made one of the best come back ever.

 

[Ludak021]

Yea, open features, like freesync, it's very free.

 

[neeyik]

Looking forward for an open standard which would benefit everyone.

This is where DirectML will come into play - essentially just a collection of libraries for DirectX 12, it provides an easier way of using GPUs to accelerate machine learning algorithms and temporal upscaling (DLSS and AMD's Super Resolution are examples of this) is one such application. All DirectX 12 GPUs will support it and it contains a system called metacommands that active hardware-specific features - so Nvidia GPUs with Tensor cores can utilise them to further accelerate DirectML workloads (providing the instructions fit within the Tensor Core's operating limits).

 

[Stoly]

Looking forward for an open standard which would benefit everyone. Right now only about 30-40 games support DLSS and that is not enough to convince me to get nVidia, I probably will go with new AMD gpu as I'd like to support the open approach to new features and I'm happy with the performance.
Still, I think the AMD will show something better next year. After getting more money from CPU division the GPU engineers can afford more talents and focus on their job. And they actually do not have to help CPU guys anymore AMD made one of the best come back ever.

Make that like 15 games of which on about 5, DLSS actually makes the game look good.

 

[nnguy2]

Make that like 15 games of which on about 5, DLSS actually makes the game look good.

20% of the time it works 100% of the time.

 

[Nobina]

I'll take DLSS / Super Resolution over ray tracing every day of the week.

 

[defaultluser]

I guess that leaves them plenty of time to have it ready to roll by the time they release the RX 5700 XT next year. I'm not spending $500 on an RT-capable graphics card.

It also gives us plenty of time to see if AMD can avoid the Navi 1.0 driver cluster the second time round?

 

[Avro Arrow]

Lets be perfectly honest here. Things like DLSS and Super Resolution are not really relevant to high-end cards that can play anything at 2160p natively. Upsampling technology is far more relevant to the lower-end cards that need it in order to play games at 2160p.

Ray tracing may cause a noticeable fps hit on the RX 6800 but the RX 6800 XT and RX 6900 XT are so fast that it shouldn't make a difference. Same goes for the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090.

Ray tracing is still in its infancy anyway so right now, it's more of a frill than anything else. I don't see that changing any time soon because most games are action games and you could turn the shadows and ground textures to minimum and most people wouldn't notice when trying to "kill or be killed".

 

[quadibloc]

I thought that AMD already had a competitor to DLSS with its previouis generation of video cards, by the name of Radeon Image Sharpening, so that Super Resolution is simply an improvement, and therefore the Radeon 6000 series cards will still have a feature with the same basic function as DLSS at launch, just not the final version, which will be better.

 

[treetops]

Meh only like 10 games on dlss 2.0, I actually like the concept of Radeon boost but I don't play any games that use it

 

[Joray K Joseph]

I thought that AMD already had a competitor to DLSS with its previouis generation of video cards, by the name of Radeon Image Sharpening, so that Super Resolution is simply an improvement, and therefore the Radeon 6000 series cards will still have a feature with the same basic function as DLSS at launch, just not the final version, which will be better.

Yeah I wonder how people forgot about this, Radeon did it first and was heaps better than when Nvidia tried to compete with DLSS 1.0 that made everything a fuzzy mess

 

[neeyik]

Radeon Image Sharpening isn't an upscaling algorithm, though - as it's name suggests, it's a post-processing filter to enhance small contrast changes on a surface. Their current upscaling system (just called 'GPU scaling') can be enabled independently of RIS.

It does seem like AMD are making a bit of a meal out of their naming schemes, by calling their DirectML DLSS-clone FidelityFX Super Resolution. It's almost exactly the same name as their Radeon Virtual Super Resolution (which is a down scaling, super sampling, filter).

 

[Stoly]

I thought that AMD already had a competitor to DLSS with its previouis generation of video cards, by the name of Radeon Image Sharpening, so that Super Resolution is simply an improvement, and therefore the Radeon 6000 series cards will still have a feature with the same basic function as DLSS at launch, just not the final version, which will be better.

RIS IQ was better than DLSS 1.0 in some games, but it just can't reach DLSS2.x quality. Its just upscale + image sharpening. Nvidia also has this feature directly in the driver panel.

The best thing about DLSS and hopefully DirectML is not only the performance increase, but the AA and IQ improvement.