AMD unleashes FSR to take on Nvidia DLSS – but launch titles may disappoint
Godfall is the main highlight here
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AMDhas released its latest graphics driver complete with FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) which rivalsNvidia’s DLSS, with a small number of titles supported out of the gate, and many more planned to get the benefit of this frame rate boosting tech.
The initial games which now offer FSR aren’t the most high-profile titles the PC gaming arena has to offer, but they includeGodfall, plus Terminator: Resistance, a rather overlooked shooter that captures the Terminator atmosphere nicely, and offers some interestingly crafted missions.
Also getting FSR support we have Anno 1800, Evil Genius 2, Kingshunt, 22 Racing Series, and The Riftbreaker.
More games will be given an FSR boost as 2021 rumbles onwards, with over 40 developers having pledged support to AMD in this respect. The tech will be made widely available to devs from mid-July as a download from the AMD GPUOpen community.
DLSS differences
FidelityFX Super Resolution differs from DLSS in that it’s an open source project, and also itdoesn’t employ machine learning(AI) as withNvidia’s solution – although the latter has led to some question marks over exactly how that might affect FSR’s viability in terms of the upscaling quality delivered compared to Team Green’s rival tech.
The good news about FSR being an open standard is that it doesn’t just apply toAMD hardware, but can also run onNvidia’s GPUs(giving benefit to titles which don’t have DLSS support).
AMD claims FSR can provide up to 2.4x faster performance upscaling to4K(compared to running 4K resolution natively). However, the proof will be in the pudding, and we’ll be testing FSR in-depth, so watch this space for our findings later this week.
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Just like DLSS, AMD will offer different modes with FSR, including ‘ultra quality’ and ‘quality’ for a better image quality, ‘performance’ to run much faster while visibly degrading quality, and a ‘balanced’ setting to deliver good performance but without so much quality being sacrificed.
Games that will support FSR in the future include Far Cry 6 andResident Evil: Village, with other titles inbound from big-name publishers including EA and Ubisoft.
Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).
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