AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution benchmarked: How big of a difference does it actually make?

AMD RX 6700 XT Source: AMD

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution — shortened downwards to "FSR" to not exist such a mouthful — was finally unveiled at Computex 2022. It's the long-awaited reply to NVIDIA's ain curiosity, DLSS, which leverages bogus intelligence and neural networks to make PC games look and run meliorate.

Now that AMD's FSR has launched, we can put it to the test to see how well it works in the games it'south really uniform with.

What is AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution?

Some of the finer details almost how AMD's FSR works are notwithstanding a bit cloudy, but we do know quite a bit about the engineering science. FSR doesn't deal with any previous frames (history buffers) and it doesn't rely on AI for training, instead focusing more than on upscaling and sharpening. Frames start out at a lower resolution, are anti-aliased, then striking the FSR layer for upscaling and sharpening. AMD says a complex algorithm is used to create those high-res frames.

I wrote a much more thorough FidelityFX Super Resolution vs. NVIDIA DLSS article explaining how each works. But at the end of the day, both technologies take a frame rendered at a lower-than-native resolution, upscale information technology, and sharpen it to expect as close to the original every bit possible.

One of the biggest differences is uniform hardware. NVIDIA'due south DLSS requires RTX GPUs — which are some of the all-time graphics cards — with defended Tensor cores. AMD'southward FSR, which doesn't demand whatsoever specialized hardware, works on Radeon RX 6000, RX 5000, RX 500, RX Vega, and some RX 400 cards. It also works with NVIDIA hardware, going all the way back to GTX x-series GPUs that don't piece of work with DLSS.

What games work with AMD FSR?

Godfall Source: Gearbox Games

There are currently vii games compatible with AMD's FSR.

Godfall
The Riftbreaker
Terminator: Resistance
Kingshunt
Evil Genius 2: World Domination
22 Racing Series
Anno 1800

That list is expected to grow by at least 12 in the coming months, with huge titles like Far Weep 6, Resident Evil Hamlet, and MYST gaining support. There are also a ton of development studios already on board, so nosotros expect FSR to come to plenty more games in the hereafter.

How much of a divergence does AMD FSR make?

To see how much of a departure AMD'south FSR can make, I tested a few of the supported games using an AMD Radeon RX 6800 GPU, AMD Ryzen vii 5800X CPU, 32GB of DDR4-3200MHz RAM, and an MSI Magazine B550 Tomahawk motherboard.

FSR has iv dissimilar quality modes: Performance, Balanced, Quality, and Ultra Quality. To enable FSR, all you lot need to do is select one of these presets from the in-game carte. It'south that easy. Depending on the resolution you're looking to play at, the game will be rendered at a lower resolution before being upscaled. That'south where the performance boost comes into play, since your hardware doesn't have to actually render frames at, say, 4K. AMD's GPUOpen website has a chart that shows exact numbers.

Amd Fsr Quality Mode Dev Chart Source: AMD

As you can run across, if y'all select FSR's performance way for a 1080p display, your PC is actually going to render frames at just 960x540, alleviating a ton of load. But don't expect Operation mode to keep your games looking just every bit fresh as native 1080p rendering. In that location'southward a noticeable deviation, even with relatively high-end hardware.

Using Ultra Quality, games expect about equally practiced as with FSR turned off, but visual degradation gets worse as you move down toward Performance style. It'southward harder to see with still images, but movement blur is particularly bad in Functioning mode. It's all the same certainly playable, and anyone with low-end hardware is no doubt going to take the higher frame rates with the blur. You can see beneath the differences in image quality in Godfall.

Godfall with FSR off on the left, Godfall with FSR Ultra Quality on the right.

Godfall with FSR off on the left, Godfall with FSR Functioning on the correct.

Now let's take a look at frame rates in graph form, with UHD (4K) in purple and QHD (1440p) in gold. Equally you can encounter in the graphs below, AMD's FSR makes an enormous difference in performance.

In Godfall, I got an average of 48 FPS at 4K without FSR turned on. With Ultra Quality FSR enabled, which doesn't brand much of a departure to visual fidelity, frame rates were additional to an average of seventy FPS. If you're trying to hit the sixty FPS threshold that most 4K monitors have, this is going to help. The Riftbreaker showed an fifty-fifty larger bound at 4K, moving from 98 FPS with FSR turned off to 134 FPS with Ultra Quality FSR enabled.

It's clear that FSR can make a huge performance divergence in supported games. And different NVIDIA'south DLSS, FSR is available in far more GPUs thanks to it not requiring defended cores. FSR even works on some of NVIDIA'south GPUs that don't support DLSS, which is huge.

My impression is that DLSS nonetheless does a better job in terms of delivering overall image quality with additional FPS, and due to its maturity information technology's available in many more games. Once DLSS and FSR start condign bachelor in the aforementioned games nosotros will be able to have a much closer look at how they compare. The bottom line remains that AMD's FSR is a huge boon to nearly everyone with a semi-modern GPU, and we hope to run into it in plenty more games shortly.

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