Xbox Series X|S consoles now support some of AMD FidelityFX features

[jsilva]

What just happened? During Microsoft Game Stack Live 2021, AMD announced it has made available the FidelityFX feature set for Microsoft Xbox Series X|S developers. As you probably know, the Xbox is powered by an 8-core AMD Zen 2 CPU and an RDNA 2-class GPU. From now on, we should start seeing Xbox Series X|S games featuring AMD FidelityFX's Variable Shading, Contrast Adaptive Sharpening, and even the recently updated Denoiser.

AMD Fidelity FX is an open-source package of technologies with cross-platform support used to improve graphics quality without sacrificing the game's performance. FidelityFX already features eight technologies, including Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS), Combined Adaptive Compute Ambient Occlusion (CACAO), variable rate shading (VRS), Stochastic Screen Space Reflections (SSSR), Denoiser, Luminance Preserving Mapper (LPM), Single Pass Downsampler (SPD), and Parallel Sort (radix sort algorithm).

In addition to these, AMD is also developing FidelityFX Super Resolution which is the company's take on Nvidia DLSS and is expected to release later this year for PC and consoles.

For now, the Xbox Series X|S will only support three of the eight technologies included in FidelityFX, but more may come later. The Xbox Series X|S Game Development Kit (GDK) now includes VRS to improve performance by varying the shading rate, CAS to sharpen and scale an image, and the ray-traced reflections and shadows Denoiser.

The introduction of FidelityFX on the new Xbox consoles should pave the way to a friendlier cross-platform development environment. As devs work on a newly developed game for PC and Xbox consoles, the implementation of FidelityFX can be done for both versions simultaneously, saving precious time and resources for other tasks.

Moreover, working with FidelityFX for consoles should be more manageable than for the PC platform as the former come with a specific configuration (or two), while PCs are inherently modular which adds a complexity layer due to the variety of possible configurations devs must account for.

Support for FidelityFX on PlayStation 5 hasn't been announced yet. However, Sony's console is also powered by AMD RDNA 2 graphics, so it should come eventually.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/89397-xbox-series-xs-consoles-now-support-amd-fidelityfx.html

 

[Vulcanproject]

Extra granularity of settings, useful tools primarily for console games.

With these little tweaks like variable rate shading and adaptive sharpening all they are really doing is reducing image quality to try and claw back performance. Used subtly they can smooth out performance bumps with near invisible effect on image quality.

Used heavily like they inevitably will be on consoles they noticeably cut back on overall fidelity. The denoiser for example looks to add a lot of blur even on the demo shots they released. VRS can be used with a light touch to scrape another 10 percent more performance, or it can obliterate detail when aggressive.

AMD need a quality response to DLSS, which essentially adds information to an image rather than all these tricks like variable rate shading which take it away. DLSS bins half of these console tools. Super resolution better be good and it also better be very low overhead, otherwise it'll be marginal gains on console.

 

[punctualturn]

 

[kiwigraeme]

Extra granularity of settings, useful tools primarily for console games.

With these little tweaks like variable rate shading and adaptive sharpening all they are really doing is reducing image quality to try and claw back performance. Used subtly they can smooth out performance bumps with near invisible effect on image quality.

Used heavily like they inevitably will be on consoles they noticeably cut back on overall fidelity. The denoiser for example looks to add a lot of blur even on the demo shots they released. VRS can be used with a light touch to scrape another 10 percent more performance, or it can obliterate detail when aggressive.

AMD need a quality response to DLSS, which essentially adds information to an image rather than all these tricks like variable rate shading which take it away. DLSS bins half of these console tools. Super resolution better be good and it also better be very low overhead, otherwise it'll be marginal gains on console.

I like it - consoles and early PCs were heavily constrained - it meant programmers had to use tricks, ingenuity and GOOD coding etc.
Remember when we had 16K word processors , 50K databases - 1k games

Now we have progs wasting memory, stupid big downloads to update something minor .
Switch has to mimic AA games - good on them

 

[scavengerspc]

Remember when we had 16K word processors , 50K databases - 1k games

Umm, no I don't. But 1k games. Is that what used to be called boot games?

 

[fadingfool]

Umm, no I don't. But 1k games. Is that what used to be called boot games?

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~uzdm0006/scans/1kchess/

Playable game of chess in less than 1024 bytes.

 

[scavengerspc]

http://users.ox.ac.uk/~uzdm0006/scans/1kchess/

Playable game of chess in less than 1024 bytes.

It has been so long ago, but I remember even some big releases would have tiny playable ripoff versions of Pac-Man, Space Invaders, etc. at the beginning of a floppy (yep, that long ago) and if we did some specific things the tiny game would boot. Maybe some of the earliest Easter Eggs.

 

[kiwigraeme]

I had a C64 -brought with my hard earn cash as a teenager Monitor, C64, Floppy drive +joysticks , printer - $US2000

most games 30k to 50K in memory - more if ran on native machine code.
I look at Docx documnet holding not much 16K - like is there some basic starting size of all unused parameters?

I think there's competition to get the smallest OS

 

[Phyrino]

PS5 does not have full RDNA 2, so it is not certain that they can implement it in the console.