At Computex 2021, we were very excited to share with everyone an update on one of our most anticipated technologies ever, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR). At this event, you got an early first look at FSR running of Counterplays Game’s Godfall and saw the amazing performance uplift it can offer to gamers while preserving up to near-native resolution gaming experience.

Fast-forward to today, and the launch of FidelityFX Super Resolution is upon us, with 7 games available that support FSR, including 22 Racing Series, Anno 1800, Evil Genius 2, Godfall, Kingshunt, Terminator: Resistance, and The Riftbreaker. We are also announcing that we have 12 more confirmed games coming out in the future that will support FSR, including Far Cry 6 and Resident Evil: Village, along with over 40 leading game developers and publishers on board, such as Capcom, Electronic Arts, Gearbox, Obsidian Entertainment, and Ubisoft, who will also bring FSR to their future titles.

This unprecedented level of support for FSR builds upon the support we have for our other AMD FidelityFX technologies, which are already available in more than 45 games. With the addition of FSR, we now over 70 developers supporting AMD FidelityFX technologies!

In this blog, we take a deeper dive into some more detailed information on FSR, including why it is needed, how it works, how it performs, and all the games and partners we have lined up to support it. You can also watch some check out FSR in action on Twitch today being played by some of our #AMDRedTeam partnered streamers.

Today’s Challenges for Gamers and Developers

The where/why/and how people play games is rapidly evolving, which throws up a lot of challenges for both gamers and developers. Today’s gamers are increasingly moving towards gaming on laptops, playing on high-refresh displays, expecting next-generation visuals (with technologies like raytracing), and extracting the maximum amount of performance from their hardware. Developers too are challenged when creating next-generation gaming experiences that can support a wide range of hardware and deliver high framerates for as broad an audience of gamers as possible.

That’s where upscaling and image reconstruction comes in as a way to solve some of the pain points gamers and developers both have. Upscaling can help deliver the needed performance boost to experience the latest gaming technologies on as many platforms as possible. And while other upscaling solutions have been available for some time, we believe that FidelityFX Super Resolution offers the most appealing upscaling solution available today for both gamers and developers. Here’s why.

Introducing AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, Built for Gamers

FidelityFX Super Resolution uses cutting-edge upscaling technologies to help boost your framerates and deliver high-quality, high-resolution gaming experiences. FSR has been developed to significantly improve performance in many of the challenging scenarios that modern gamers face – getting better performance when demanding technologies like raytracing are turned on, achieving high framerates in the latest games on high-refresh-rate monitors, and playing the latest games at maximum detail on laptop graphics as well as on older graphics cards.

With FidelityFX Super Resolution, gamers can expect to get on average 2.4x the performance when running at 4K in FSR “Performance” mode in select titles (3), and with our state-of-the-art spatial upscaling algorithm delivering up to a near-native resolution quality gaming experience with super high-quality edges and detail.

There are four quality modes available, so you can find the perfect balance between the best image quality and the best performance, and FSR is broadly supported on multiple platforms and graphics cards – from the latest generation of graphics cards all the way back to AMD cards from 2016.

This broad level of support will help drive the adoption of FSR into as many games as possible, as evidenced today with our announcement of 19 games that currently support or will support FSR in the future and the backing of over 40 leading game developers.

Also Built for Game Developers

At the core of our feature and technology development philosophy is our support for developers. One of the major pillars of GPUOpen is a firm belief in the benefits of supporting open standards and providing open-source solutions for developers – at AMD we put developers first. FidelityFX Super Resolution is an excellent example of this philosophy.

FSR is a scalable solution supported on a broad spectrum of graphics cards and platforms. It works across multiple OSs and supports multiple APIs (DirectX® 11, 12, and Vulkan®). It is easy for developers to integrate, and it does not require any special per-game training or history information from previous frames.

It also complements other FidelityFX technologies we have available on GPUOpen – and using those solutions together with FSR can help developers deliver amazing next-generation gaming experiences with advanced graphics features like raytracing at a performance level that will let almost any gamer enjoy them. FidelityFX Super Resolution will be open source and available for developers on GPUOpen in mid-July.

How Does FSR Work?

FSR, like all upscaling solutions, lowers the render resolution of the game to significantly improve performance then upscales the lower resolution input back to your target resolution, using its cutting-edge algorithm to improve the super resolution output quality to up to near-native resolution image quality (of note, FSR does require developer integration into a game to work).

The upscaling process analyzes the source image to detect edges and then reconstructs them in high definition at the target higher resolution. Then a sharpening pass further improves the image quality by enhancing pixel detail. Both passes take place in a single step in a game’s graphic pipeline. This simple and single-step integration into the graphics pipeline is part of the reason why FSR is so easy for developers to add to their games.

The result is a super resolution image with super high-quality edges and distinctive pixel detail when compared to basic point or bilinear upscaling -- at the highest “Ultra Quality” mode, FSR’s image quality is indistinguishable from the target native resolution when viewed from normal gaming viewing distances.

FSR Modes for Optimal balance of Quality to Performance

With FidelityFX Super Resolution, you can choose between four different quality settings, allowing you to adjust the balance between image quality and performance as you see fit. This allows you to configure FSR to your personal preference, the “sweet spot” if you will, whether that is achieving the best image quality with a still significant performance boost, or prioritizing performance above all else, allowing you to play the latest games at higher detail settings and higher resolutions on as many graphics cards as possible, both old and new.

The four different quality modes are listed below and for image quality comparison purposes, they should be evaluated at normal gaming view distances:

• “Ultra Quality” mode produces an image with quality virtually indistinguishable from native rendering with good performance. It should be selected when the highest FSR quality is desired.
  
  
• “Quality” mode produces an FSR image with the quality representative of native rendering while delivering great performance.
  
  
• “Balanced” mode produces an FSR image approximating native rendering quality and delivers exceptional performance for gamers.
  
  
• “Performance” mode visibly impacts image quality and should only be selected in situations where the need for the ultimate in performance is critical.

To give you some insight as to how these different modes work at two common gaming resolutions, 4K and 1440p, the table below shows the scaling factor and the input resolution of each mode.

Note – when comparing the image quality of the various modes against native resolution (i.e., not upscaled) you should turn off any additional or external image sharpening solutions that may not allow you to properly evaluate which FSR mode is right for you. Additionally, in some situations, FSR at “Ultra Quality” can produce visibly better-than-native image quality at normal gaming viewing distances on titles that don't employ separate sharpening or use it sparingly.

What You Really Want – Performance!

Give me more performance! And that’s exactly what FidelityFX Super Resolution delivers. Performance, and lots of it! Depending on your level of graphics card, monitor resolution, and type of game you are playing, FSR can help deliver better gaming experiences across a wide range of situations. Let’s have a look at some of these and see the performance gains FSR can deliver in your games:

As you can see, FSR solves a lot of gaming performance issues for a wide range of gaming scenarios and gaming hardware, and it is not just for the latest graphics cards – FSR is supported on over 100 AMD graphics cards and processors. See the table below for a complete list of supported AMD products.

Wait, FSR works on NVIDIA graphics too?

There’s more? Yes, in fact, in our Computex presentation we showed you a preview of FSR running on the NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1060, and we know this was very well received by a lot of gamers. Well, we are not stopping there -- We have currently validated that FSR supports NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 30 & 20 series graphics cards and GeForce® GTX 16 & 10 series cards.

The performance overhead of FidelityFX Super Resolution on AMD and NVIDIA® graphics cards is comparable for GPUs within the same segment (e.g. Radeon™ RX 6800 XT vs. NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 3080) and the expected performance gains in games will be similar on both platforms. However, we do want to make it clear that AMD does not provide technical or warranty support for end-users for FSR enablement on other vendors’ graphics cards.

As we showed above for AMD graphics, FSR can help your gaming in many different scenarios, and for older NVIDIA cards here are some situations we think FSR can help with:

Graphics solutions relying on open or industry standards benefit the gaming industry over proprietary solutions and will accelerate the adoption of FSR into many more games for more gamers than other upscaling solutions.

The Moment You’ve Been Waiting for: The Supported Games

Of course, none of the above matters at all if FidelityFX Super Resolution is not available in the games you love. Today, we’re excited to announce that 7 games are enabled with FSR immediately:

22 Racing Series, Anno 1800, Evil Genius 2, Godfall, Kingshunt, The Riftbreaker, Terminator: Resistance.

Asterigos, Baldur’s Gate 3, DOTA 2, Edge of Eternity, Far Cry 6, Farming Simulator 22, Forespoken, Myst, Necromunda: Hired Gun, Resident Evil Village, Swordsman Remake, Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodhunt.

More games will be announced in the future, so check out the FSR web page to keep up to date, sign up for our newsletter. And keep telling us what game YOU want to see with FSR.

When updating these games to support FSR we also recommend that you download the AMD Radeon™ Adrenalin Software 21.6.1 driver, our latest release that is optimized for games with FSR.

To prevent over-sharpening, we recommend not to use Radeon™ Image Sharpening with FSR-enabled games.

Developer Partners

FidelityFX Super Resolution is off to a great start with strong industry support from over 40 game developers, including ACME Game Studios, Counterplay Games, Capcom, Crystal Dynamics, Exor Studios, Electronic Arts, GIANTS Software, GOATi Entertainment, Illfonic, Larian Studios, Luminous Productions, Midgar Studios, Nixxes, Obsidian Entertainment, Perfect World Games, Rebellion, Teyon, Ubisoft, Unity, Vaki Games, Valve, and Warner Bros. Games.

Let’s See What Developers Have to Say About FSR:

“AMD has helped us bring our vision to fruition to top the performance of our game, Asterigos, with AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution. It has been great to be one of the AMD FSR supported titles. And we look forward to continuing working with them in the future.” — Cheng Hsien Lin, Game Director, Acme Gamestudio

“With FidelityFX Super Resolution, AMD has delivered another amazing platform-agnostic feature that’s easy for developers to implement and provides Godfall players higher performance at higher resolutions with everything cranked way up, including raytracing.” — Keith Lee, CEO, Counterplay Games

“FidelityFX Super Resolution is a great tool that helps many of our users achieve sharper visuals in Myst on all levels of hardware. We can't wait for the world to see how Myst looks with FidelityFX Super Resolution integrated!” — Hannah Gamiel, Development Director, Cyan Worlds

“Implementing AMD Fidelity FX Super Resolution into The Riftbreaker was one of the smoothest technology integrations that we have ever done. Thanks to AMD's "no black box" philosophy we were able to very easily implement it on both PC and consoles and tweak it for the specifics of our game engine. FSR is a cutting-edge upscaling solution that's available on all modern graphics hardware and combines superior quality with blazing fast performance.” — Pawel Lekki, COO, Exor Studios

“Thanks to AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution our upcoming title Farming Simulator 22 will be able to deliver a more detailed rendering quality without sacrificing framerate. Supporting FSR right from the start is another exciting step for us and lets the good times grow in our Farming Simulator universe!” — Stefan Geiger, CTO & Founder, GIANTS Software

“High-speed games need high-speed frames - FidelityFX Super Resolution delivers, and all at 4K. FidelityFX Super Resolution is perfect for 4K gaming, and it is also great for accessibility and up-res’ing for our players on integrated graphics machines. FidelityFX Super Resolution helps us to hit 4k and retain high frames. We love it, and our players love it.” — Garth Midgley, Managing Director, GOATi Entertainment

“AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution is a best-in-class spatial upscaling solution.  One thing we really like about AMD’s FSR is it doesn’t suffer from temporal ghosting, which has been a huge issue for us in past projects.  FSR has a very low overhead latency, which is able to deliver higher performance, that even competing products can’t compete with.”  — Charles Brungardt, CEO, Illfonic

“FSR is an amazing upscaler, it brings a level of quality very close to a native image while improving a lot of the framerate. It's also simple to integrate and works everywhere.” -- Jérémy Zeler-Maury, CEO, Midgard Studio

“AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution is a performant and easy-to-integrate upscaling solution that Nixxes is happy to provide in their games, to allow for increased performance for players across a wide range of GPUs.” — Jurjen Katsman, Studio Head, Nixxes

“With AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution we are able to offer customers improved image quality at a lower performance cost than full resolution rendering. This is particularly attractive for users with mid-range GPUs wanting to target higher resolutions. We’re very pleased that it is designed for use with all GPUs and AMD’s open-source approach with FSR.” — Dan Ginsburg, Graphics Developer, Valve

More developers are rapidly joining us in supporting FSR, visit our FSR web page for the latest updates.

FSR Has You Covered

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution delivers performance for all gamers with no hardware purchase necessary. Whether you have an old or new GPU, enthusiast-class or integrated graphics, laptop or desktop graphics, AMD, or another brand, FSR has you covered. FSR is designed for rapid adoption - with an open approach, developers big or small can begin to implement this feature and have it up and running in a short period of time.

This release of FSR is just the beginning of things to come. As you have seen with our AMD Radeon™ Adrenalin Software, we never stop fine-tuning and optimizing our solutions.  We're not stopping here --there are teams around the world that are already working on bringing improvements to our FSR technology and we’re looking forward to sharing more details with you in the future. Stay tuned for more, and from all of us at AMD, Happy Gaming!

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