Testing AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR): Image Analysis and Preliminary Performance

[nnguy2]

So what happens in this scenario?

1440p monitor, game set to 4k vsr and fsr to utlra quality. What is the quality and performance vs 1440p native?

 

[punctualturn]

People are saying this is a better overall solution to DLSS.

-Just like DLSS, FSR works on a per game basis, so the implication old cards now have new life or AMD is doing more for Nvidia cards than Nvidia is laughable at best.

-Nvidia is at DLSS 2.2 now. Not 2.0.

-AMD will have to work with each dev and vastly improve Quality presets. This is AMD we're talking about, so expect FSR to fade away sooner than later.

-AMD actually asked if gamers wanted their Radeon Image Sharpening software to work with DX11 games before doing it. That's insane.

I am sooooo confused as to why there is so much faith in a company that has a history of not wanting to take the time and control of things like Freesync and Mantle, and inferior tech like AMD Chill and FRTC.

A company that renames L3 to Game Cache, Hyper Transport to Infinity Fabric and whatever Infinity Cache is to make them sound more exciting I guess.

Mantle went to Khronos and Freesync went to monitor manufacturers. TressFX is Crystal Dynamics. Remember that one? The Hairworks killer! Still used in Tomb Raider only?

Nothing tells me AMD is in this for the long haul. Wake me in 6 months.

 

[Watzupken]

Funny that AMD is improving the performance nVidia cards!

Good article but just a quick look. A more in-depth analysis is definitely needed.

I think this is the attractiveness of FSR, and something that AMD needs and wants to dull the uptake of DLSS. If a developer can kill 3 birds with 1 stone (3 because Intel mentioned they will support FSR as well), then it makes development work easier for them, and a faster time to market for their product. Which is why we see Nvidia suddenly so hard at work trying to round up developers to use DLSS. Obviously the visual quality is not as good, but considering it requires no special hardware to use it, is a win for gamers. In fact if you are an Ampere/ Turing card owner, its better because now you get to enjoy both DLSS in Nvidia sponsored titles and also FSR.

 

[sreams]

It is 1440p,not 2160 anymore.

2160p DLSS/FSR with a 1080p source is arguably better quality than vanilla 1440p, and with a higher framerate. It's all upside.

Another way to look at it... go listen to some music in AAC format (compressed). Now listen to the same music in an uncompressed format, but with the same file size. The compressed audio wins, and by a lot.

Compression/DLSS/FSR are ways to increase quality without sacrificing file size (in the case of audio) or framerate (in the case of DLSS/FSR).

 

[Watzupken]

People are saying this is a better overall solution to DLSS.

-Just like DLSS, FSR works on a per game basis, so the implication old cards now have new life or AMD is doing more for Nvidia cards than Nvidia is laughable at best.

-Nvidia is at DLSS 2.2 now. Not 2.0.

-AMD will have to work with each dev and vastly improve Quality presets. This is AMD we're talking about, so expect FSR to fade away sooner than later.

-AMD actually asked if gamers wanted their Radeon Image Sharpening software to work with DX11 games before doing it. That's insane.

I am sooooo confused as to why there is so much faith in a company that has a history of not wanting to take the time and control of things like Freesync and Mantle, and inferior tech like AMD Chill and FRTC.

A company that renames L3 to Game Cache, Hyper Transport to Infinity Fabric and whatever Infinity Cache is to make them sound more exciting I guess.

Mantle went to Khronos and Freesync went to monitor manufacturers. TressFX is Crystal Dynamics. Remember that one? The Hairworks killer! Still used in Tomb Raider only?

Nothing tells me AMD is in this for the long haul. Wake me in 6 months.

FSR is better not because visually its better. Its better because its open and easier to implement both technically and in doing so, benefits all GPUs from AMD, Nvidia and even Intel at some point. These reasons are good enough to sway developers since it will cut time to market by quite a fair bit as oppose to implementing some bespoke technology. FSR benefits consoles even more, and as I expect most game developers to adopt FSR for console games, PC versions may also come with FSR as a side effect.
I agree AMD don't seem to follow through on technologies that they came up with. But in all these cases, the technology is made open to all, which I think is ultimately a good thing. So no company can hold you random and force you to pay extra in order for you to use that technology.

 

[punctualturn]

Excuses after excuses....

Amazing how so many keep missing the point as to why dlss is bad for consumers and AMD is proving that its not necessarily to shackle their customers using dirty tactics and vendor lock-in.

 

[Angga B]

1st iteration/attempt at killing nvidia dlss and "render" it irrelevant. Almost there, AMD, almost there.

 

[hahahanoobs]

FSR is better not because visually its better. Its better because its open and easier to implement both technically and in doing so, benefits all GPUs from AMD, Nvidia and even Intel at some point. These reasons are good enough to sway developers since it will cut time to market by quite a fair bit as oppose to implementing some bespoke technology. FSR benefits consoles even more, and as I expect most game developers to adopt FSR for console games, PC versions may also come with FSR as a side effect.
I agree AMD don't seem to follow through on technologies that they came up with. But in all these cases, the technology is made open to all, which I think is ultimately a good thing. So no company can hold you random and force you to pay extra in order for you to use that technology.

AMD consoles do need all the help they can get, but FSR won't do a thing.
AMD sucks at software. Nothing they've made stands out today.

 

[Irata]

This is an interesting comment about the time it took to implement FSR. It should be higher for AAA games.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1407463045404712963

 

[Irata]

AMD consoles do need all the help they can get, but FSR won't do a thing.
AMD sucks at software. Nothing they've made stands out today.

Software wise, Vulkan comes to mind.

Vulkan - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[hahahanoobs]

Software wise, Vulkan comes to mind.

Vulkan - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Khronos Group.

 

[Puiu]

People are saying this is a better overall solution to DLSS.

-Just like DLSS, FSR works on a per game basis, so the implication old cards now have new life or AMD is doing more for Nvidia cards than Nvidia is laughable at best.

-Nvidia is at DLSS 2.2 now. Not 2.0.

-AMD will have to work with each dev and vastly improve Quality presets. This is AMD we're talking about, so expect FSR to fade away sooner than later.

-AMD actually asked if gamers wanted their Radeon Image Sharpening software to work with DX11 games before doing it. That's insane.

I am sooooo confused as to why there is so much faith in a company that has a history of not wanting to take the time and control of things like Freesync and Mantle, and inferior tech like AMD Chill and FRTC.

A company that renames L3 to Game Cache, Hyper Transport to Infinity Fabric and whatever Infinity Cache is to make them sound more exciting I guess.

Mantle went to Khronos and Freesync went to monitor manufacturers. TressFX is Crystal Dynamics. Remember that one? The Hairworks killer! Still used in Tomb Raider only?

Nothing tells me AMD is in this for the long haul. Wake me in 6 months.

Hairworks killed itself, TressFX didn't need to do it. TressFX is still getting some attention from devs and AMD (2020 version 4.1 update added integration for UE). And it isn't just for games, for example it can be used in Maya for hair and collision authoring.

Because TressFX is open source devs can make changes or use it in many different ways. For example, Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn uses a modified version of TressFX (they had to make it easier on the resources for the PS4 to run it properly since TressFX is usually meant for high end PCs). I bet you didn't know that this game used it. Deus Ex also used a modified version (the power of open source).

Dev quote on TressFX modification they made: "we had to overcome a series of technical difficulties to have approximately 50 fully dynamic splines drive a game mesh of 100k tris at 3-5ms at 30fps on a PS4"

Freesync is still an AMD certification so I don't get what you are trying to say. The only thing I can take away from what you wrote is that manufacturers are using it which is a good thing. You seem to be confused as to what freesync is.

Mantle did its job, it forced MS to fastforward DX12 and make Nvidia lose the perf lead it had with its dx11 driver CPU overhead. On low level APIs like DX12 it's AMD that has a lower CPU overhead.

Why are so confused about so many things?

edit: added more TressFX info

 

[Irata]

Khronos Group.

Vulkan is derived from and built upon components of AMD's Mantle API, which was donated by AMD to Khronos with the intent of giving Khronos a foundation on which to begin developing a low-level API that they could standardize across the industry.

The above is a quote from the linked Wikipedia article.

 

[SantaBunny]

People are saying this is a better overall solution to DLSS.

-Just like DLSS, FSR works on a per game basis, so the implication old cards now have new life or AMD is doing more for Nvidia cards than Nvidia is laughable at best.

-Nvidia is at DLSS 2.2 now. Not 2.0.

-AMD will have to work with each dev and vastly improve Quality presets. This is AMD we're talking about, so expect FSR to fade away sooner than later.

-AMD actually asked if gamers wanted their Radeon Image Sharpening software to work with DX11 games before doing it. That's insane.

I am sooooo confused as to why there is so much faith in a company that has a history of not wanting to take the time and control of things like Freesync and Mantle, and inferior tech like AMD Chill and FRTC.

A company that renames L3 to Game Cache, Hyper Transport to Infinity Fabric and whatever Infinity Cache is to make them sound more exciting I guess.

Mantle went to Khronos and Freesync went to monitor manufacturers. TressFX is Crystal Dynamics. Remember that one? The Hairworks killer! Still used in Tomb Raider only?

Nothing tells me AMD is in this for the long haul. Wake me in 6 months.

Wow, that's a lot of false information in one comment.

So FSR is just a different approach for upscaling, not better or not worse than DLSS1/2. It's different, with different advantages and drawbacks.

FreeSync is still fully controlled by AMD. They validate the monitors. They provide a lot of engineers for the monitor manufacturers, to ensure that a design is compatible with FreeSync at launch. The manufacturers pay for the validation at per monitor basis before launch. While the underlying specification for VESA Adaptive-Sync is standard, there is no guarantee that it won't generate errors. But the FreeSync certification is error-free. The reason why there is much more FreeSync compatible monitors, than G-Sync Compatible, is that AMD working with the manufacturers to design their montiors to FreeSync, while NVIDIA just provide software updates in the driver, to fix the errors, but they don't spend that much resource for this, so they validate much less monitors.

Mantle is still in the driver. It can be accessed in developer mode. They use this for prototyping new techniques.

Chill and FRTC doesn't require developer support. These are just driver level features, and still works in almost every game.

Infinity Fabric is vastly different than HyperTransport. The basics are more closer to Freedom Fabric. AMD bought that with SeaMicro. But the underlying changes are significant. That's the reason why is it so hard to copy it. Intel can use some chiplet packaging technology, but doing this for high performance chips, are much-much harder, and for now, only AMD solve this problem with Infinity Fabric.

Well Mantle not went to Khronos. They just give the source code for them, but Mantle is still owned by AMD, and they still update it for themselves. As I said, Mantle is still in the driver, and they prototype a lot of things on it.
As I said earlier, AMD sill owns FreeSync, the monitor manufacturers pay for them for the validation.

TressFX is still owned by AMD, and they still update it. Crystal Dynamics just modify it, which is the advantage of open source. And they use it in alot of titles, like Deus Ex, Marvel's Avengers, they even use it for their new Guardians of the Galaxy game. And they not the only one... even Guerrilla Games use it for Horizon Zero Dawn for example, or NetEase... Death Strandings hair solution is also a modified TressFX.

 

[m3tavision]

Khronos Group.

Why do you even respond...? It is quite obvious you are young and do not even know tech history, or many of the things you post about.... they sound more like rants than a discussion.

A bit of history... (already linked for you, in which you didn't read)


Wiki:
Vulkan is derived from and built upon components of AMD's Mantle API, which was donated by AMD to Khronos with the intent of giving Khronos a foundation on which to begin developing a low-level API that they could standardize across the industry.

 

[Beerfloat]

Alternative headline:
AMD introduces knock-off of other company's technology: Not quite as good

But then I guess that could work for half of AMD's headlines

 

[Irata]

Alternative headline:
AMD introduces knock-off of other company's technology: Not quite as good

But then I guess that could work for half of AMD's headlines

I agree on the ‚not quite as good‘ statement, but that does not mean it‘s bad. It seems that in particular the higher performance modes have noticeably lower IQ for FSR vs. DLSS 2.

Is it a knock off though ? Seems like a different approach (simpler from a technology POV) for the same (technical) goal with a different target group.

There are pros and cons to both AMD‘s and nVidia‘s approach and hopefully the market will freely decide which is better and not sponsorship deals with exclusivity clauses.

Either way, the fact that both solutions exist will ideally make both nVidia and AMD work on improving and getting their solutions implemented. That‘s how competition works.

 

[dragosmp]

Not bad, I expected much worse to be honest.

I wonder if AMD can bake AI into it, and release an "FSR 2.0" that improves it's image quality, especially when upscaling to and from lower resolutions.

Beyond the marketing terms, this is a battle between temporal and spatial up-scaling. I see no reason we can't have both from both vendors. OK, there's the AI bit on DLSS, but how much of that does it need to run on the tensor cores, is the tensor core code image-quality crytical, and if it is crytical, can it be off-loaded to a CPU core or three. My understanding is the AI part is actually performed off-line by Nvidia, it's just compiled for NV hardware, as opposed to x86.
The question is would NV include spatial up-scaling and target general purpose CPUs (as opposed to promoting AI buzz)? Probably yes to the first, and no to the second, the AI buzz is just too sweet.
Also, would AMD include temporal up-scaling next to the spatial? They could on the current hardware if they can run it on CPU cores, there's plenty of high speed CPU cores on consoles and PCs nowadays

 

[Irata]

Beyond the marketing terms, this is a battle between temporal and spatial up-scaling. I see no reason we can't have both from both vendors. OK, there's the AI bit on DLSS, but how much of that does it need to run on the tensor cores, is the tensor core code image-quality crytical, and if it is crytical, can it be off-loaded to a CPU core or three. My understanding is the AI part is actually performed off-line by Nvidia, it's just compiled for NV hardware, as opposed to x86.
The question is would NV include spatial up-scaling and target general purpose CPUs (as opposed to promoting AI buzz)? Probably yes to the first, and no to the second, the AI buzz is just too sweet.
Also, would AMD include temporal up-scaling next to the spatial? They could on the current hardware if they can run it on CPU cores, there's plenty of high speed CPU cores on consoles and PCs nowadays

Running parts of the process on the CPU (as option) would be a good idea as that would make high core count CPU more attractive.

 

[Aranarth]

Just to make this clear:

DLSS and FSR are intended to give you SIMILAR visual quality at HIGHER FPS.

If you want the BEST visual quality then you turn all the graphics quality sliders up at your monitor's native resolution and you turn FSR or DLSS OFF.

If your video card can handle it producing, say, 80fps minimum / 100fps+ avg at your current settings then this is not for you.

If your video card can't handle it and you don't want to turn the sliders down then give this a try.
If it still can't handle it your gonna have to play with the other sliders to get the fps up to 60+.

I consider FSR and DLSS just another slider to use along with all the other sliders available to get the best trade off between visual quality and FPS.

I'm not gonna use it with my 6800xt, I will probably get the latest drivers for my rx580 8gb that is in my other machine.

I don't get all the debate and angst talking about this at all.
It's just another option to play with!

 

[punctualturn]

Vulkan is derived from and built upon components of AMD's Mantle API, which was donated by AMD to Khronos with the intent of giving Khronos a foundation on which to begin developing a low-level API that they could standardize across the industry.

The above is a quote from the linked Wikipedia article.

Bro, dont waste your time on that one, he is just trolling at this point.

He was provided the needed info, but still insist is spreading false information.

 

[hahahanoobs]

Vulkan is derived from and built upon components of AMD's Mantle API, which was donated by AMD to Khronos with the intent of giving Khronos a foundation on which to begin developing a low-level API that they could standardize across the industry.

The above is a quote from the linked Wikipedia article.

It's cute you think I don't know where it came from. Point STILL being - it's not run by AMD. It's run by Khronos Group. AMD had it for maybe a year then passed it off. AMD has a habit of doing that. And when they're not doing that, they slap their name on someone else's product. ie: AMD RAM (lol)with Patriot, and AMD RAM DISK software no one uses.

I can keep going....

 

[hahahanoobs]

Wow, that's a lot of false information in one comment.

So FSR is just a different approach for upscaling, not better or not worse than DLSS1/2. It's different, with different advantages and drawbacks.

FreeSync is still fully controlled by AMD. They validate the monitors. They provide a lot of engineers for the monitor manufacturers, to ensure that a design is compatible with FreeSync at launch. The manufacturers pay for the validation at per monitor basis before launch. While the underlying specification for VESA Adaptive-Sync is standard, there is no guarantee that it won't generate errors. But the FreeSync certification is error-free. The reason why there is much more FreeSync compatible monitors, than G-Sync Compatible, is that AMD working with the manufacturers to design their montiors to FreeSync, while NVIDIA just provide software updates in the driver, to fix the errors, but they don't spend that much resource for this, so they validate much less monitors.

Mantle is still in the driver. It can be accessed in developer mode. They use this for prototyping new techniques.

Chill and FRTC doesn't require developer support. These are just driver level features, and still works in almost every game.

Infinity Fabric is vastly different than HyperTransport. The basics are more closer to Freedom Fabric. AMD bought that with SeaMicro. But the underlying changes are significant. That's the reason why is it so hard to copy it. Intel can use some chiplet packaging technology, but doing this for high performance chips, are much-much harder, and for now, only AMD solve this problem with Infinity Fabric.

Well Mantle not went to Khronos. They just give the source code for them, but Mantle is still owned by AMD, and they still update it for themselves. As I said, Mantle is still in the driver, and they prototype a lot of things on it.
As I said earlier, AMD sill owns FreeSync, the monitor manufacturers pay for them for the validation.

TressFX is still owned by AMD, and they still update it. Crystal Dynamics just modify it, which is the advantage of open source. And they use it in alot of titles, like Deus Ex, Marvel's Avengers, they even use it for their new Guardians of the Galaxy game. And they not the only one... even Guerrilla Games use it for Horizon Zero Dawn for example, or NetEase... Death Strandings hair solution is also a modified TressFX.

TressFX is STILL used in one game. Yup. Go AMD partnerships!

AMD software is not good, yet on day one their SW gets praise cuz AMD is about openness. Wow. Can you and mainstream tech community fanboy any harder with hopes and dreams AMD won't mess this up?

I would be all about openness too if my software was trash.

Linux is free and still only a handful use it but if you listen to them, they tell you Linux is the best when it most def is NOT!

DLSS from a SOFTWARE company is doa, but we should go all in on company that can barely write a driver?

No. Just no.
You'll see what I'm talking about in 8 months when FSR is just a thought.

 

[hahahanoobs]

Why do you even respond...? It is quite obvious you are young and do not even know tech history, or many of the things you post about.... they sound more like rants than a discussion.

A bit of history... (already linked for you, in which you didn't read)


Wiki:
Vulkan is derived from and built upon components of AMD's Mantle API, which was donated by AMD to Khronos with the intent of giving Khronos a foundation on which to begin developing a low-level API that they could standardize across the industry.

I know history and how to read.
Show me on that wiki where it says AMD is still developing Mantle.

Then show me how it's a threat to DX years after AMD dumped it.

I'll wait....

 

[Irata]

It's cute you think I don't know where it came from. Point STILL being - it's not run by AMD. It's run by Khronos Group. AMD had it for maybe a year then passed it off. AMD has a habit of doing that. And when they're not doing that, they slap their name on someone else's product. ie: AMD RAM (lol)with Patriot, and AMD RAM DISK software no one uses.

I can keep going....

You can, but I prefer to find out if the ignore list works.