Thursday, March 18th 2021
Confronting NVIDIA's DLSS: AMD Confirms FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) to Launch in 2021
AMD, via its CVP & GM at AMD Radeon Scott Herkelman, confirmed in video with PCWorld that the company's counterpart to NVIDIA's DLSS technology - which he defines as the most important piece of software currently in development from a graphics perspective - is coming along nicely. Launch of the technology is currently planned for later this year. Scott Herkelman further confirmed that there is still a lot of work to do on the technology before it's ready for prime time, but in the meantime, it has an official acronym: FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution). If you're unfamiliar with DLSS, it's essentially an NVIDIA-locked, proprietary upscaling algorithm that has been implemented in a number of games now, which leverages Machine Learning hardware capabilities (tensor cores) to upscale a game with minimal impact to visual quality. It's important because it allows for much higher performance in even the latest, most demanding titles - especially when they implement raytracing.
As has been the case with AMD, its standing on upscaling technologies defends a multiplatform, compatible approach that only demands implementation of open standards to run in users' systems. The idea is to achieve the broadest possible spectrum of game developers and gamers, with tight, seamless integration with the usual game development workflow. This is done mostly via taking advantage of Microsoft's DirectML implementation that's baked straight into DX 12.
One detail doesn't instill confidence in how soon we'll see this technology out in the wild; Scott Herkelman in the video says that there are multiple approaches to such an upscaling solution, and that they're being evaluated in the lab; this either means that AMD hasn't yet decided on the technologies to leverage for the upscale via Microsoft's Direct ML, or that the company is actively working on two or more different approaches to actually be able to measure their benefits, drawbacks, and ability for deployment in a large scale. All in all though, it's great to know that things are coming along nicely, as such a technology has an immense return potential not only for PC gamers (perhaps even NVIDIA-toting ones, if AMD's solution truly is hardware agnostic), but also for console players. If the performance increases we can expect from FSR are comparable to those of DLSS, we can expect an immense amount of power being unlocked in current-gen consoles. And that, in turn, benefits everyone.
Watch the full PCWorld video below:
Source:
via Videocardz
As has been the case with AMD, its standing on upscaling technologies defends a multiplatform, compatible approach that only demands implementation of open standards to run in users' systems. The idea is to achieve the broadest possible spectrum of game developers and gamers, with tight, seamless integration with the usual game development workflow. This is done mostly via taking advantage of Microsoft's DirectML implementation that's baked straight into DX 12.
Watch the full PCWorld video below:
89 Comments on Confronting NVIDIA's DLSS: AMD Confirms FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) to Launch in 2021
I think they are in a process of creating an airplane without wings and the problem is that they haven't yet thought the concept of a helicopter.
Nvidia makes something new but makes it proprietary.
AMD makes something similair but makes it open.
The open version becomes the standard.
its funny that it is still so imprinted in my mind even though I never really had anything to do with it, dont own Tomb Raider which I associate most with that tech, but when I see a character with long hair upside down and the hair is not falling down as well I always thing "tsk tsk, non of that HairFX".Nah, if they truely make it painless to integrate it should just become a standard like freesync or so.
And if their approach is based on Microsoft ML and not on a proprietary solution that has to be added on top of a games' development cycle, they are much more likely to achieve that.You're forgetting the millions of consoles being sold with AMD hardware inside, the benefit for developers in just slapping FSR to increase performance without having to fiddle with a million performance-affecting knobs, and calling it a day. And you're also forgetting that if the solution is truly agnostic, it will work on NVIDIA as well. So yeah.
AMD marketshare in the PC is so small now that it just doesn't incentivize developers to utilize their tech vs DLSS (well unless AMD paid them to)Sure and the result is DLSS 1 image quality that nobody wants :roll:
Anyways does Switch counts as console? it's getting DLSS there :D
Will devs implement the unproven system, yes, because consoles
Honestly, whats the point in a high refresh low response monitor if the GPU is smearing everything to shit in motion anyway.
Ironically though, it is true that AMD has the sort of leverage to make this more widespread through Sony and MS than Nvidia could ever do with their 978969283% market share or whatever they have right now.
They can do something equivalent to DLSS Performance (4x upscaling, think 1080p > 2160p) or Ultra Performance mode (9x upscaling, 720p > 2160p) and nobody will bat an eye to image quality impact :)
Then say consoles are running games at 4K60 or 4K120 and reap the marketing benefits.
I remember the time when you had to choose graphics cards based on the games you wanted to play, as no card supported every game with proprietary APIs (Glide, S3D, etc.). I don't want this to happen again.
I guess what I am saying is that this is a significant technological struggle for an audience that doesn't care.Same way Nvidia did, Control used a version of DLSS that ran exclusively on shaders. So there was never a particular need for dedicated hardware apparently.