AMD has announced the immediate availability of version 2.1 of its popular FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) algorithm on GPUOpen, bringing an even bigger knife to the fight against Nvidia's proprietary DLSS technology. Version 2.1 of FSR delivers a number of performance and visual quality improvements to the FSR 2.0 package, with improvements to some of its more glaring issues, such as ghosting and shimmering - artifacts of temporal-based solutions that look at previous frames in order to reconstruct the ones that come after.
The new update is already being distributed in the latest version of "Farming Simulator," released early this week - and AMD shared a couple of screenshots that showcase the differences in implementation. The improvements to ghosting - one of the more prevalent issues in the new age of temporal supersampling - are readily apparent.
There are a number of changes under the hood, but all of them appear to deal with increased stability of temporal images, less artifacting and even improved image quality - specifically, the release notes indicate that AMD has turned some half-precision computations to full precision ones. By itself, this change has the potential to reduce performance, but AMD didn't mention any performance reduction as part of the new update, so it's likely other areas saw performance improvements that could outweigh the penalty. Remember that in graphics technology, image quality improvements always impact the performance equation. Quashing some bugs, as AMD also says it did, could be a way to recoup more performance still.
AMD is clearly committed to its FSR support, which saw a relative defeat in its first iteration when compared to the more mature and computationally-heavy DLSS. But AMD has persevered, and its continuous improvements to the algorithm showcase that it's up to the task of maintaining its software solutions - especially amidst the expected competition from Intel, which is gearing ever closer to releasing its Arc Alchemist graphics cards with their own upscaling algorithm, XeSS (Xe Super Sampling).
AMD's release includes an update to its FSR 2 Unreal engine plugins - an extremely welcome tool for Unreal Engine developers to streamline their FSR integration. According to AMD, changes from FSR 2.0 to 2.1 should be easy for game developers to implement - a potential boon for the 45 available or upcoming games that make use of AMD's open-source and vendor agnostic upscale technology.
As part of its release of FSR 2.1, AMD also announced a cadre of games that will feature support for its latest supersampling tech:
- Choo-Choo Charles
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Deep Rock Galactic
- Destroy All Humans! 2 – Reprobed
- Miasma Chronicles
- No One Survived
- Project Haven
- Red Dead Redemption 2
- Scathe
- Scorn
- VEIN.
FSR support on "Red Dead Redemption 2' has certainly been a long time coming for AMD gamers. If you want to see the new FSR 2.1 algorithm at work, AMD has provided a comparison video that should make improvements clearer (especially when it comes to shimmering, which is nigh impossible to capture in a still frame).
