Rumor mill: The developers of a piece of frame-capturing software recently claimed AMD is set to announce the second generation of FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), which could further improve image upscaling in PC games compared to its predecessor. The announcement could come shortly before the company's planned GDC talk on upscaling.
The official Twitter account of CapFrameX recently posted details about FSR 2.0, saying AMD will announce it soon. CapFrameX and VideoCardz claim to have seen internal slides from AMD describing additional features it will have on top of FSR 1.0, which launched last summer.
The biggest improvement is temporal upscaling, which uses information from previous frames to help upscale new frames from lower resolutions to higher resolutions. This is already used in temporal anti-aliasing as well as FSR's competitors, Nvidia's DLSS and Intel's upcoming XeSS.
The upgraded FSR will have better image quality than the current version, and in some cases can look better than the native resolution it's upscaling to. When playing a game in 4K with ray tracing, FSR 2.0 in performance mode - which would upscale from 1080p - could almost double framerates, which sounds similar to what DLSS 2.0 has pulled off. If FSR 2.0 is coming, ultimately we'll have to wait for benchmarks and comparison screenshots from real games in order to make a solid judgement on it.
Like its predecessor, FSR 2.0 won't use any proprietary machine learning hardware, which means it probably won't incorporate AI upscaling. DLSS does use ML hardware for AI upscaling which is why it requires one of Nvidia's RTX graphics cards. XeSS will use a similar AI technique but will work on a wider range of hardware through DP4a instruction. FSR 2.0 will support hardware from both AMD and its competitors.
We already know from AMD's calendar that it will hold a presentation on image upscaling on March 23 during the 2022 Game Developers Conference. The company could reveal FSR 2.0 sometime before then.