DF: AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution FSR Review: Big FPS Boosts, But Image Quality Takes A Hit

[Corralx]

At which point you'd basically just going temporal AA which already exists. DLSS works because it uses specific tensor cores to work, whereas a move to temporal would have the same hit as TAA does now.

Click to shrink...

Which is probably part of why AMD went this route.
They had a specific objective in mind and surely they talked with partners before implementing such solution.
Implementing a temporal upscaler might not have the same value, other than didactic, because a lot of developers already have a working solution for their needs.

 

[CorpseLight]

AMD does this with every new "innovation" they release, sometimes it's justified (Smart Access Memory, Freesync) other times it's completely lackluster (Radeon Chill, FSR).

What's inane here are the people that before this released assuming this would be a competitor to DLSS, and would have comparable performance uplifts. DLSS works in a completely different fashion and is unlike anything in the market currently and FSR might as well be AMD Branded TAA scaling.

Click to shrink...

I don't think I have EVER used Radeon chill

 

[Mudo]

Yeah this isn't going to be proper replacement for DLSS anytime soon, and I realize that it's different tech.
And this is what, if anything, the XSX and PS5 will be able to take advantage of, correct?
It's too bad we can't get a DLSS like solution with that quality on consoles but as I understand it, they aren't
using Nvidia stuff in the consoles so it isn't a possibility?

Anyways, providing the option for this on consoles will be great if it comes to pass. Just let people decide whether they
want to use it or not, so if you want more pretty you can have it at the expense of frames.

 

[Deleted member 14089]

Nice! I'm not going to try to say anything as an armchair expert, but just from watching the initial result, I would be happy.

Curious to see where they will go from here!

Personally I think I've reached a point where doing these sorts of comparisons (static non-moving shots or zooming in 200%+) don't really serve much of a purpose.

Click to shrink...

For a technical analysis, you do have to make these 200% zoom-ins to see where a technique shines or breaks apart. It's a common practice for many fields and industry when it concerns images. I mean practically every camera review and even smartphone camera reviews do that :p. It's how you do such an analysis. As a consumer or end-user, like you're saying, yeah it's not really the main focus.
Just throwing that in there haha, you can ignore it :p.

 

[Deleted member 10675]

Which is probably part of why AMD went this route.
They had a specific objective in mind and surely they talked with partners before implementing such solution.
Implementing a temporal upscaler might not have the same value, other than didactic, because a lot of developers already have a working solution for their needs.

Click to shrink...

According to leaked slides, their initial approach was temporal based, I imagine their solution wasn't that good performance-wise on old cards and that is why they went with this simpler approach.

 

[SimpleCRIPPLE]

Did AMD ban them from saying DLSS? Because it was pretty obvious how hard he was trying to dance around the subject. "Other image enhancing techniques...." then shows a clip with DLSS labeled on the bottom.

 

[KainXVIII]

How was results with 1080p resolution?

 

[Corralx]

According to leaked slides, their initial approach was temporal based, I imagine their solution wasn't that good performance-wise on old cards and that is why they went with this simpler approach.

Click to shrink...

I don't see why performance would be an issue?
If third party developer can use temporal upscalers across all supported generations, certainly AMD can as well.

 

[Serpens007]

It looks better than expected, but I guess it'll be better use when even the temporal solutions don't quite cut the performance wanted at 4K

 

[ShinUltramanJ]

Yeah, not a DLSS competitor in the slightest. Maybe one day but not today.

Click to shrink...

Doesn't need to be a competitor.

AMD's bringing better performance to thousands (millions?) of people that don't own 20XX/30XX cards, which is awesome.

 

[dynamitejim]

Godfall seems weird since the zoom ins show it's doing the film grain pass pre-upscale instead of at the native 4K, which is not what AMD recommends. Bet the differences in Ultra Quality would be even less noticeable otherwise. Ultra Quality really seems like a no brainer win for anyone not using 20x0/30x0 series cards.

 

[Koklusz]

Insomniac should license out their temporal solution. It's so good.

Click to shrink...

They should license out the entire engine, that thing is a beast. Although I guess it's a Sony property these days :/

 

[Deleted member 3038]

I don't think I have EVER used Radeon chill

Click to shrink...

Back when I had a 390 and a 590 I only used it for whenever I was playing a game that had a lot of downtime like Overwatch LOL, other than that it was practically useless. Had a Play of the Game popup on your screen and you stopped moving your mouse? Enjoy your 15FPS Replay!

 

[TetraGenesis]

" If a game only offers basic upscaling, FSR will do a better job, but why would a game only have basic upscaling? Every major engine on the market - whether it's from Ubisoft, Epic, Capcom or Square-Enix - has some form of TAA upscaling already "

Exactly what I've been saying the moment we learned how it worked. I don't get why people are even taking seriously the notion that it is a competitor to DLSS. It's not even the same kind of thing any more than any other upscaling technique. And the reason people love DLSS is because it's revolutionary. We've had upscaling techniques that are pretty impressive already before DLSS, but DLSS is in another world from them. Why is this not laughed out of the conversation? Honestly.

Click to shrink...

Exactly. The TAAU comparison was a "/thread" moment and exactly what I expected from FSR. I want to see how it compares to checkerboard rendering and stuff too (similarly poorly, I imagine).

 

[Ploid 6.0]

Looks good to me, good performance, cheap? Nice. I hope more devs update their games to have it as an option asap.

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution Quality Comparison & Benchmarks (FSR)

This content compares AMD’s new FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) image quality, benchmark performance, and defines how it works. We’ll also talk about CAS a...

www.youtube.com

 

[dgrdsv]

How was results with 1080p resolution?

Click to shrink...

The lower the resolution the worse it will do due to lower amount of data and lower display PPI. My take is that it's fine for usage on 4K TVs in Q/UQ mode but on monitors and modes below Q it's likely DOA. Well, it may be okay to some on 24-28" 4K monitors probably.

They should license out the entire engine, that thing is a beast. Although I guess it's a Sony property these days :/

Click to shrink...

Their engine is using a lot of licensed stuff which they can't just re-license out. Some GameWorks are there for example.

 

[Kabalcage]

This FSR looks like a big compromise in favor of fps. That comparison to unreal engine taa is pretty dramatic and considering the simiar gpu cost, it seems like taa or any other temporal method is vastly superior in image quality.

That said, I do think FSR can have a home in places where image quality isn't as important, mobile integrated gpus can really benefit with fsr and get closer to playable fps. It also seems like ultra quality is a step down but might not be very noticeable at 4K with normal tv viewing distances. There is the upside of devs contributing to AMD and helping them improve the reconstruction method over time.

Not great, but not bad either. Dlss and taa seem to be superior methods thus far, but the open AMD approach is a wise one.

 

[Dlanor A. Knox]

Is this out?
Do we have to download anything to be able to use it or do you just get the option enable it if a game supports it?

 

[ILikeFeet]

Is this out?
Do we have to download anything to be able to use it or do you just get the option enable it if a game supports it?

Click to shrink...

The supported game will have updated to have the option in the menu

 

[VariantX]

Doesn't need to be a competitor.

AMD's bringing better performance to thousands (millions?) of people that don't own 20XX/30XX cards, which is awesome.

Click to shrink...

Really this should be the takeaway here. You're probably not going beat the dedicated hardware solution with software anyway. If you have those cards then DLSS is likely the best choice. For the rest of market, FSR works on alot more cards.

 

[LightKiosk]

Is this out?
Do we have to download anything to be able to use it or do you just get the option enable it if a game supports it?

Click to shrink...

You can test it in the Riftbreaker demo on Steam at the moment.

I just did so on my 5700 XT at 1440p using the Ultra Quality preset. The difference in IQ is there, though barely noticeable and even less when in movement (I imagine this is overall much better at 4K), but in turn I got a 30FPS bump. Pretty much exactly what I expected from it, and was nice to see first hand. Now to wait for more games to support it.

 

[Dlanor A. Knox]

The supported game will have updated to have the option in the menu

Click to shrink...

You can test it in the Riftbreaker demo on Steam at the moment.

I just did so on my 5700 XT at 1440p using the Ultra Quality preset. The difference in IQ is there, though barely noticeable and even less when in movement (I imagine this is overall much better at 4K), but in turn I got a 30FPS bump. Pretty much exactly what I expected from it, and was nice to see first hand. Now to wait for more games to support it.

Click to shrink...

Cool, thanks!

Yeah i'm using a 24' 1440p monitor so I don't think i'll notice the difference that much, exciting stuff for me.

I'll boot up Riftbreaker to try it out later

 

[Spoit]

I'm genuinely surprised that multiple people are saying that it's actually better in motion, since the discontinuity between different frames is where dlss breaks down. I would have expected this to be even worse there, since it lacks any temporal awareness, which I'd have expected to exacerbate the problem

 

[Lashley]

Did AMD ban them from saying DLSS? Because it was pretty obvious how hard he was trying to dance around the subject. "Other image enhancing techniques...." then shows a clip with DLSS labeled on the bottom.

Click to shrink...

? It's comparing to DLSS, TAA upscaling and bilinear, Alex literally shows the comparisons before saying this

 

[brawndolicious]

To me, it seems like a good starting point where in the future, maybe they can either improve the spatial technique or implement an intermediate step using prior frame data like the temporal/checkerboard/DLSS solutions.

Question: Since FSR is currently just a spatial technique, is there any reason it can't just be slapped on top of TAAU? Basically use FSR on the final output of a temporal method to get additional quality gains?

 

[Carn]

while the first results arent 'that impressive', if it's easy to support for developers I can imagine that it being available as an option won't hurt at all. It will be up to the player to decide if the pros/cons are worth it.

 

[ILikeFeet]

Question: Since FSR is currently just a spatial technique, is there any reason it can't just be slapped on top of TAAU? Basically use FSR on the final output of a temporal method to get additional quality gains?

Click to shrink...

you can use TAA and then use this to upscale

 

[Chief Malik]

Insomniac should license out their temporal solution. It's so good.

Click to shrink...

UE5 has the best one so far, I wonder how software patents work. Like is it impossible for people to do it in the same way?

 

[SolarPowered]

DF's was the last of the techtuber FSR reviews I've seen and by far the most negative. Others also analyzed the different games/fps results/image quality and almost everyone came to the same conclusion. Ultra quality/quality 4K and QHD ultra quality look deecent to great and give anywhere from 20 to almost 40% fps increase. A lot of people were expecting worse image quality than 80% resolution scale and DLSS 1.0 visuals, but this certainly was better. Ultra quality 1080p will be fine for budget GPU owners. They're not exactly the cyborg eye demographic, especially when playing even moderately fast games. Hardwarecanucks, Hardware unboxed and Gamersnexus had particularly fair reviews.

Honestly, the most surprising thing about this was how bad the promotional comparison images were for the 1060. Reviewers showed no visual differences between nvidia and radeon gpus. AMD had us thinking nvidia cards were going to look like a vaseline smeared mess.

 

[brawndolicious]

you can use TAA and then use this to upscale

Click to shrink...

Sounds good and probably how this will evolve going forward. The DF video seems to say that you need a temporal method to actually fill in the interior texture details but FSR is a decent way of cleaning up edges.

I think we'll know more in a few years about who the "winner" is but it's very exciting to see more competition in this space.

UE5 has the best one so far, I wonder how software patents work. Like is it impossible for people to do it in the same way?

Click to shrink...

Basically, anyone else can do the same thing but they have to do it without looking at the source code of the already existing competitor. Legally, it's all a bit funky but I would expect a lot of convergent evolution when two different teams independently make software that has the same goal.

 

[Jroc]

Makes me wonder if people on older cards would be equally impressed by dropping the rendering resolution and cranking the TAA + Sharpening. "Never game below native res" has been burned into the collective consciousness of PC gamers to the point where people might not realize how good reconstruction already is.

 

[RoboPlato]

DF's was the last of the techtuber FSR reviews I've seen and by far the most negative. Others also analyzed the different games/fps results/image quality and almost everyone came to the same conclusion. Ultra quality/quality 4K and QHD ultra quality look deecent to great and give anywhere from 20 to almost 40% fps increase. A lot of people were expecting worse image quality than 80% resolution scale and DLSS 1.0 visuals, but this certainly was better. Ultra quality 1080p will be fine for budget GPU owners. They're not exactly the cyborg eye demographic, especially when playing even moderately fast games. Hardwarecanucks, Hardware unboxed and Gamersnexus had particularly fair reviews.

Honestly, the most surprising thing about this was how bad the promotional comparison images were for the 1060. Reviewers showed no visual differences between nvidia and radeon gpus. AMD had us thinking nvidia cards were going to look like a vaseline smeared mess.

Click to shrink...

It's probably because they look at reconstruction more than a lot of PC focused channels since they cover console games in-depth so they have a wider frame of reference for the quality of these techniques.

 

[CobaltBlu]

DF's was the last of the techtuber FSR reviews I've seen and by far the most negative. Others also analyzed the different games/fps results/image quality and almost everyone came to the same conclusion. Ultra quality/quality 4K and QHD ultra quality look deecent to great and give anywhere from 20 to almost 40% fps increase. A lot of people were expecting worse image quality than 80% resolution scale and DLSS 1.0 visuals, but this certainly was better. Ultra quality 1080p will be fine for budget GPU owners. They're not exactly the cyborg eye demographic, especially when playing even moderately fast games. Hardwarecanucks, Hardware unboxed and Gamersnexus had particularly fair reviews.

Honestly, the most surprising thing about this was how bad the promotional comparison images were for the 1060. Reviewers showed no visual differences between nvidia and radeon gpus. AMD had us thinking nvidia cards were going to look like a vaseline smeared mess.

Click to shrink...

Is it really negative? DF just seems to be explaining what FSR is doing and comparing it to reconstruction methods that are already available in those game engines. If there are methods available with better image quality that are almost as performant than why would people want to use FSR instead? If you want to that's fine, but personally I appreciated the tone of the review because it helps me understand what alternatives are available and where FSR falls inside of those. Seems perfectly fair to me.

 

[ILikeFeet]

Sounds good and probably how this will evolve going forward. The DF video seems to say that you need a temporal method to actually fill in the interior texture details but FSR is a decent way of cleaning up edges.

I think we'll know more in a few years about who the "winner" is but it's very exciting to see more competition in this space.

Click to shrink...

if you ask me, neither FSR nor DLSS will "win". TAAU made by devs and engine makes meet in the middle for a best of both worlds. it preserves interior details unlike FSR and its agnostic unlike DLSS. maybe the source code of FSR gets coopted into some games, but devs will large tech staff will continue to ignore it unless AMD (or Nvidia) pays them to put it in

Durante made a post on Reddit that I feel sums it up well

Very well said.

Of all the coverage I've seen of this today, yours is the one where it's clear that the presenter actually has some fundamental understanding of the issues involved.

FSR (in its current iteration) simply isn't interesting for any game or engine which has access to a decent temporal reconstruction technology. That doesn't make it useless though: I've worked and continue to work on a lot of mid-tier games where that isn't an option, and we currently only offer basic upsampling for low-end systems. Anything that's both cheap and generally better than other upsampling (with comparable cost) is a win in such cases.

Click to shrink...

Reddit - Dive into anything

www.reddit.com

 

[SolarPowered]

How was results with 1080p resolution?

Click to shrink...

Acceptable for budget gamers that don't have 4K/1440p ultra quality experience and that's most people. Those of us with higher resolution monitors and visual standards will definitely notice a quality drop. Just proof that AMD has more work to do with Ultra quality and quality mode. It's a great start, though. Hoping RE Village gets FSR sooner rather than later. Was gonna skip it as a GTX 1060 owner, but I wanna try FSR for myself now and I couldn't think of a more appropriate first trial.

It's probably because they look at reconstruction more than a lot of PC focused channels since they cover console games in-depth so they have a wider frame of reference for the quality of these techniques.

Click to shrink...

Might be

It's just strange to think that one single channel's take could be so definitive when almost a dozen others are giving us positive (but not glowing for most) reviews. Watching DF's take alone would make one think anything other than UQ 4K FSR mode is a flat out substandard experience when I saw almost a dozen videos of comparison footage with my own eyes saying otherwise. Thinking on it further I think you're right. To someone like myself who's moderately familiar with the terminology/tech their take really might just come across as nitpicky when in reality they're just being thorough.

Is it really negative? DF just seems to be explaining what FSR is doing and comparing it to reconstruction methods that are already available in those game engines. If there are methods available with better image quality that are almost as performant than why would people want to use FSR instead? If you want to that's fine, but personally I appreciated the tone of the review because it helps me understand what alternatives are available and where FSR falls inside of those. Seems perfectly fair to me.

Click to shrink...

I suppose so

It was just such a different take than everyone else's. All in all I suppose it'll help us see the forest for the trees as far as upscaling tech goes. Relying on just one channel is bound to limit one's thinking, perception and understanding.

 

[LGHT_TRSN]

Hopefully they can improve it. As it stands now it's not remotely comparable to DLSS it seems.

 

[MorshuTheTrader]

Eh, I was hoping for some better results out of the gate. Hopefully it'll get more robust over time

 

[TheMadTitan]

Makes me wonder if people on older cards would be equally impressed by dropping the rendering resolution and cranking the TAA + Sharpening. "Never game below native res" has been burned into the collective consciousness of PC gamers to the point where people might not realize how good reconstruction already is.

Click to shrink...

Text becoming fuzzy is why I don't drop the resolution often. FSR would keep text and HUD information crisp, which is a tradeoff I'd be fine with making. Especially in the future since I'll be sitting further away rather than sitting at a computer monitor.

 

[Miniature Kaiju]

Text becoming fuzzy is why I don't drop the resolution often. FSR would keep text and HUD information crisp, which is a tradeoff I'd be fine with making. Especially in the future since I'll be sitting further away rather than sitting at a computer monitor.

Click to shrink...

Most games nowadays allow you to scale the rendering, what usually leaves text and UI untouched at native res.

 

[patientx]

Tried it with my good old rx480 at 1080p in Rift Breakers and other than performance mode the image quality doesnt take too much of a hit -at least for me to be noticable but even with this card and with this resolution the fps gains are huge, hopefully this comes to next bf and other aaa titles too.

 

[CrispyGamer]

Ultra quality mode looks great

 

[PapaGoob]

The comments in here seem pretty negative compared to the two reviews I've watched (Hardware Unboxed and Gamers Nexus). Maybe I should look at other reviews but I've always felt those two were pretty unbiased and fair.

Seems like a decent starting point for AMD and the fact that it supports a lot more GPU's than DLSS is great too.

 

[patientx]

The comments in here seem pretty negative compared to the two reviews I've watched (Hardware Unboxed and Gamers Nexus). Maybe I should look at other reviews but I've always felt those two were pretty unbiased and fair.

Seems like a decent starting point for AMD and the fact that it supports a lot more GPU's than DLSS is great too.

Click to shrink...

People look for 4k res with expensive cards , as I said above with a rx480 the fps are far more greater then image quality loss. If nothing this is a good tech for people like me who still play in 1080p or at 1140p - 4k but in low settings.

 

[Skyebaron]

Did not expect TAAU to be so much better. Still, this is pretty great for all owners of previous gen cards. Performance is always king. I think the most important thing here is that FSR is a better solution than just lowering the resolution in game. Its the first iteration, so im pretty ok with it so far. As, always, great vid by DF.

 

[Oticon]

This just reminds me of every other proprietary tech nVidia pushes and then AMD makes an open source competitor and then the nVidia version just slowly fades away. I've seen this happen with PhysX and G-Sync already and I feel like this is going the same way. Fact of the matter is that if the tech can be utilized by a larger userbase, even if it's worse it will end up getting adopted by the industry.

 

[digitalrelic]

So, this seems straight up bad? Like, there appears to be many other solutions, even outside of DLSS, that are superior to this option already.

 

[benzy]

Does this work on an HD7850?

 

[dmix90]

Well... underwhelming as expected, i just hope that this does not affect DLSS adoption.

That's all i ask lol.

 

[HomerSimpson-Man]

Hmmm, looks so iffty, but it's still fresh and can improve overtime.

Insomniac should license out their temporal solution. It's so good.

Click to shrink...

Bluepoints engine they used to remake The Shadow of the Colossus PS4 and Demons Soul PS5 actually uses the temporal injection technique like Insomniac also with great result. Makes us wonder why it's not used more, though the similarity between Bluepoint and Insomniacs games that use them are Sony exclusive coincidently.

 

[mentok15]

Does it need new drivers to work? I'm using customer bootcamp drivers and it would probably be a bit before they update.