Just over a year after AMD released FidelityFX Super Resolution, its answer to NVIDIA DLSS, the company now releases version 2.1 of upscaling technology that renders sharper images of comparatively lower resolution scenes for improved visuals and performance. of the system.
This type of feature has become more popular as the use of PC hardware has become more optimized to put less strain on the GPU. It can also help to even out some of the loss to handle the more advanced calculations required by ray tracing, even with non-top-of-the-line components.
Among the notable novelties in the AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution version 2.1 is a new way of rendering shadows —the team was able to employ motion vector divergence to decrease blocked pixels, which should alleviate problems with ghosting in geometry with motion vectors that don’t match the underlying pixel colors. This improvement is present in the Farming Simulator 2022 game screenshot comparison above.
When working to improve graphics fidelity, there is often a performance hit, but this was not explained in the 2.1 announcement, which leads to the assumption that improvements have been made elsewhere. AMD has further improved the overall color gamut and temporal stability of the increased image produced. Some high-level calculations were updated from FP16 to FP32, but it was the shadows that received the most attention in this release.
AMD is clearly working hard to improve its software-based solution against NVIDIA DLSS, but the company still has some way to go to fill the gap and get ahead of Intel’s upcoming Arc Alchemist GPUs with Xe Super Sampling (XeSS). As a side note, AMD has released updated Unreal Engine plugins to allow developers to easily apply FSR 2.1 in Unreal games for UE 4.26, 4.27 and UE 5.
