With the introduction of mass 4K and the advent of next-generation consoles, it seemed that humanity was about to enter a bright hi-res future. But as it usually happens, on the way to the future, fate has scattered technological rakes, which we still stumble over. The narrow bottleneck in this story turned out to be video cards that were not ready to jump from Full HD to 4K. NVIDIA and Radeon tried to release affordable and at the same time powerful cards that would keep up with the times of the internet, but this did not solve the problem. Someone still has no money for a conditional RTX 3060, someone has them, but there are no video cards themselves on the market (the gamer community sends wishes of good health to all miners). As a result, the manufacturers of video cards had to somehow get out and come up with solutions at the hardware level. And both companies came to a similar solution ― artificial scaling.

It is more correct to start talking about FidelityFX, artificial scaling and supersampling with a pioneer ― NVIDIA DLSS, which in English means "Super-sampling using deep learning". In an accessible language, this means that to simplify rendering in high resolution, the creators of video cards use self-learning neural networks that learn to correct image jambs caused by an artificial increase in resolution. For example, algorithms can align pixel "ladders", apply artificial smoothing to individual objects, apply a light blur to excessively sharp parts of the frame and correct other image artifacts.

At its core, this is similar to the so-called artificial intelligence and upscaling technologies in modern televisions, but there are too many differences hidden under the hood. Unlike coarse precise scaling or bilinear upscaling, the DLSS and SFR scaling algorithms create smoother and more correct contours that are close to the original image.

For example, the first and subsequent DLSS tests showed that it does not reduce performance in any way, even with a serious increase in resolution or graphic settings. More often, the number of frames per second grows on the contrary, even if you complicate the graphic settings and turn on ray tracing. In the same Cyberpunk, after the second patch, DLSS activation increased FPS performance by 30 – 40%. And this is after the ray tracing was turned on, with which the game turned into a slideshow.

Of course, in most cases, the results with DLSS do not reach the primitive resolution in terms of quality, and when comparing natural and artificial 4K head-on, people usually choose the first one. Most often they complain about uneven processing, for example, in one part of the frame, AI can sharpen some object, and trees and buildings in the background, on the contrary, unnecessarily blur, which makes the picture look less natural. However, the results are still impressive. It's not for nothing that people joked under video reviews on YouTube that this is the magic button "show a clear photo of the killer" that is shown in detective series like CSI.

For example, in this video, DLSS is used for other purposes, trying to pull out artificially low resolution from 240p and 360p to intelligible Full HD, 2K and 4K.

Details of FidelityFX operation and differences from DLSS

Unlike DLSS, FidelityFX does not have a rigid binding to specific functions of the GPU. That is, it does not need dedicated Tensor cores, which are optimized for working with AI, neural networks and deep learning, as in NVIDIA Ampere and Turing video cards.

Another difference between DLSS and FSR is that DLSS accumulates data from several adjacent frames, while FSR operates exclusively with data within a single frame. This is one of the reasons why FSR works in conjunction with the full—screen smoothing algorithm that game developers have chosen, and the most common of them are certain types of TAA — that is, temporary smoothing.

At its core, FSR rather resembles its ancestor ― FidelityFX CAS technology, which, frankly, did not take off. The difference is that the current FidelityFX is a whole complex of improvers, and FidelityFX CAS is one of its parts. In the general processing boiler, it is located in the middle between the stages of tonal correction and smoothing. If you don't go into too much technical details, the whole processing chain looks like this.

  • First, the frame is rendered in the original image
  • Then the process of artificial resolution scaling begins
  • Then FFX enhances the local contrast
  • In the end, all this is seasoned with post-processing effects like chromatic aberration, blurring, graininess, etc.

Customization

Instead of sliders with the required resolution, AMD software operates with scaling factors: from 1.3x to 2x. The smaller the number, the better the end result. It turned out not very convenient, so at the official presentation we were shown a clear system of settings with four profiles that allow us to choose the optimal quality and performance parameters.

Ultra Quality mode provides the best zoom quality. To get 4K in this mode, you will need an original resolution of at least 2954x1662. It is followed by the Quality mode with a scaling factor of 1.5. For the coveted 4K, he needs to feed a grid of 10801440.

The third and fourth modes work rather in the opposite direction and are aimed not so much at improving quality as at optimizing FPS. For example, Perfomance mode is the only mode with a factor of 2 that can convert Full HD to 4K. In Balanced mode, the input resolution of 2259x1270 is used for 4K generation.

Popular video cards

In which games is supported

At the presentation, AMD announced support for FSR in seven games: Terminator: Resistance, Evil Genius 2, 22 Racing Series, Anno 1800, Godfall, Kingshunt, and The Riftbreaker. As you probably noticed, there are no high-profile projects on this list, but it's only a matter of time. In the near future, the FSR settings will definitely appear in Resident Evil Village, Baldur's Gate 3, DOTA 2 and Necromunda: Hired Gun ― a shooter based on the Warhammer 40K universe.

Apparently, you don't have to worry about games, since AMD has already announced cooperation with 44 game development companies, including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Gearbox, the gaming division of the giant Warner Bros and other eminent developers and publishers. Already promised that Far Cry 6 and Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodhunt will work with FSR right on release.

Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics cards

Real impressions

Being fans of testing video cards, we expected to arrange large-scale comparisons of FSR against DLSS, collect a bunch of statistics, draw a bunch of graphs and hand the well-deserved belt to the winner. But no, it's too early. The fact is that even after the release of the second version of DLSS, which brought many improvements, it is still a raw technology that strongly depends on the current version of the software, graphics card drivers and the implementation of this thing by the developers. Therefore, comparing them now is like holding sniper competitions in a strong wind.

However, already at the start, FSR looks sturdy, which gives a serious boost to FPS in a high-resolution game. The Anno 1800 policy simulator unexpectedly turned out to be a very cool benchmark for FSR. The landscapes of the game are rich in small details and with poor-quality scaling from a bird's-eye view, ladders of pixels immediately appear. When upscaling to 4K, Ultra Quality mode hides some details of the landscape, but at the same time skillfully removes excessive grain, ladders and flickering of moving objects. In this mode, the gain to the average FPS frequency increases by 33%. Considering that manual overclocking of the graphics card rarely gives more than 10% of the original power, this is impressive. Interestingly, in Performance mode, the frame rate is almost doubled in general, but the picture turns into soap soap.


Tests of the Terminator Resistance game showed an identical picture: the increase in frame rate is from 28 to 92%, the picture looks best in Ultra Quality mode, and the feature itself works equally well on old video cards like the RX 580, and on new Radeon RX 6700 XT caliber.


Among all the tested games, Godfall had the highest performance requests. In 4K resolution, even the lightest upscaling of FSR Quality added almost 50% to the average FPS. When changing the FSR settings to the next item, the frame rate increases by 75%. Well, scaling in Perfomance and Balanced modes is able to raise the frame counter by 2 – 2.5 times.


Conclusion: as in the case of DLSS, the most interesting modes are Ultra Quality and Quality, which are practically indistinguishable from native resolution and at the same time give a tangible boost to performance. How tangible it is depends on the settings, the model of the graphics card and the game itself. And the Perfomance and Balanced modes will come to court when, on an old or built-in graphics card, you want to play a new AAA project with beautiful graphics.

Conclusion: why is the output of FidelityFX cool and why are we telling all this?

In the history of FidelityFX Super Resolution, it is difficult to move away from the analogy with AMD FreeSync. This is a technology for the forced elimination of drawdowns and visual artifacts in dynamic scenes, which is now widely used in televisions and monitors. A little earlier, NVIDIA presented a similar technology called G-Sync, so few people bet on AMD. But the cunning people from the red camp made FreeSync free and lifted all restrictions on its use, and NVIDIA demanded money for a license and lost the war.

And now history seems to be repeating itself. DLSS is not the first day on the market and has already managed to prove its usefulness, and FidelityFX Super Resolution was presented literally the day before yesterday. NVIDIA has no plans to migrate DLSS to other platforms, and AMD is again on the path of openness. FSR has become part of the AMD GPUOpen open platform, which, with a strong simplification, can be called "GitHub for video accelerator developers". But more importantly, Sony and Microsoft have already announced support for this. Like it or not, it will de facto become an industry standard.

Another important advantage of FSR is compatibility with all modern video cards of recent years — namely cards based on AMD RDNA and RDNA 2 architecture, and even older GCN models, starting with Radeon RX 480/470/460. They promise correct operation even on the built-in Radeon Vega graphics. And what's even cooler, AMD technology is compatible with NVIDIA graphics cards starting with the GeForce GTX 10 series. To play a conditional Witcher in 2K on a Radeon RX 580 or GeForce GTX 1060 ― who would refuse such a thing at all? Especially looking at the price tags of current video cards.

Moreover, updated drivers with FSR for Radeon cards can already be downloaded on the official website — https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn-rad-win-21-6-1 .