AMD's response to DLSS technology brings major improvements in the performance of (individual) games

There’s nothing more rewarding than when in-game performance is boosted by a software solution - either through additional game optimization, updating the graphics card driver, or implementing new techniques and technologies. Something like this to PC gaming could start happening after June 22, 2021.

Than AMD's technology, called FidelityFX Super Resolution, or FSR for short, will be launched. This is upscaling technology that artificially increases the resolution of the game and "saves" on complexity. In translation, it simulates as if you were running a game in 1440p or 4K resolution without resulting in a huge blow to performance, or the number of frames per second.

This is nothing new, let's be clear, because consoles work on a similar principle, and Nvidia has been using a technique called DLSS for two generations, which uses machine learning to improve the performance of certain games. However, while Nvidia’s DLSS is limited to Nvidia’s RTX cards, AMD’s FSR technology is open to all, meaning it will benefit * all PC gamers * no matter whose graphics card they use.

That is, not all - the criteria still exist. To be able to take advantage of AMD FSR technology, you will need Radeon cards from the RX 6000, RX 5000, RX 500 or RX Vega series, or any Ryzen APU. If you’re on the Nvidia side, FSR will work for you with the GTX 1000 series or newer RTX.

Now, what exactly does that mean - which games will get performance improvements, and how much will those improvements be? Unfortunately - it is still unknown. Just as in the case of Nvidia’s DLSS, FSR is implemented at the game level, not the system level. This means the game has to support SFO for that technology to be of any use. And for now, we only know one game that will support that - Godfall. AMD said that 10 games were being developed that would support the SFO, but did not reveal which titles were involved.

Let's say you have the conditions to use SFO and you have a game that supports it - what is the profit from all this? It depends on the card, it depends on the game and it depends on the resolution, but here are some examples. The Radeon RX 6800 XT in 4K resolution without FSR runs Godfall at 49 fps, while with FSR it jumps to 78 fps. On the Nvidia side, the ancient GTX 1060 in Godfall at 1440p gets an acceleration of as much as 41% and jumps from 27 fps to 38 fps.

The price of acceleration? As you can see in the demonstration above - FSR brings a slight blurring of the image. Just like in the case of DLSS, playing with FSR doesn’t look as sharp as in native resolution, but it makes up for it with better performance, which can be a lifeline for owners of older graphics cards. And given current prices, we’ll all probably become owners of older graphics cards someday.