AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution Is Usable In SteamVR & Vulkan Games

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The modding community comes to the rescue!

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution slide deck
(Image credit: AMD)

Thanks to the modding community, MD's FideliltyFX Super Resolution (AMD FSR) is now usable in SteamVR and Vulkan compatible games if you are willing to follow some steps and implement it manually. Due to the open-source nature of FSR, this has allowed gamers to effectively build an FSR "patch" for both SteamVR and Vulkan.

The Vulkan modification was built by Georg Lehmann (@DadSchoorse); and works in both the dxvk shader and Steam's Proton layer by installing FSR into FSHack -- a technology that allows for lower in-game resolutions without changing the native resolution of your monitor.

This mod will allow you to use FSR in almost any Vulkan-supported game and gives you more control than AMD's normal FSR implementations. You can choose any resolution you want to upscale from, and choose a sharpness value to your own liking. 0 is maximum sharpness, and any higher number results in lower sharpening of the game.

But there are several caveats that can make adding FSR a headache, some of which include automatic upscalers which don't work at all with FSR, and the patchset can be a headache on its own to install.

You can check out the Vulkan FSR mod here.

SteamVR implementation, built by Frydrych Holger (@fholger), is a bit simpler to work with. All you need to do is download a modified .dll file and install it directly into the game's file directory.

The FSR implementation here is the same as Vulkan, allowing you to change resolutions specifically and change sharpness at will.

You can check out the SteamVR FSR mod here.

The modding community has shown us how powerful FSR's open-source nature can be, making it easy to add FSR into any game you want. This should hopefully accelerate FSR's adoption rates even more and give DLSS some extra competition.

Aaron Klotz
Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

4 Comments Comment from the forums
  • This is pretty much an interesting find !
    Reply
  • Speaking of AMD's FSR, it appears that Twitter user CapFrameX, who tests hardware, captures frame times and does analysis and logs sensor information, released screenshots of testing that was completed on the Radeon RX 6800 XT on both half-precision and single precision computations (FP16 and FP32). The use of half-precision computations and single precision computations shows that when the FP16 is accelerated, and the CPU is unable to process the information available, it will fall back to FP32. This is useful for older GPUs when trying to process information in gaming or other activities that would stress the GPU.

    Unfortunately however, it lookslike the FP32 fall back is slower with the native FP16 implementation having a 7% speed advantage in FSR.


    CapFrameX altered the AMD FSR coding when using a newer and more powerful Radeon RX 6800 XT GPU that utilizes the Nav 21 GPU. The Radeon RX 6800 XT is capable of running half precision computations, but they wanted to see what the output would be if the AMD FSR coding was altered to force the card to running single precision. To do this, CapFrameX "used a 'SciFiHelment' sample running at 4K in FSR Ultra Quality".


    What the testing showed was that there was a seven percent increase when utilizing FSR 1.0 in FP16 computations. This is a very small increase from switching between half precision and single precision acceleration. This matters because older GPUs like the AMD RX 400 and RX 500 series (polaris based) do not support native FP16. Older NVIDIA GPUs like the GTX 900 series also dont support the same while Intel's integrated GPUs don't either.

    What this essentially means is that if we are using FSR on any of these older GPU models expect a very slight single digit performance loss when compared to newer generations of graphics cards, IMO, that is unless there is some other method/trick to gain performance.

    1418900070666211329View: https://twitter.com/CapFrameX/status/1418900070666211329
    Reply
  • TCA_ChinChin
    Metal Messiah. said:
    What this essentially means is that if we are using FSR on any of these older GPU models expect a very slight single digit performance loss when compared to newer generations of graphics cards, IMO, that is unless there is some other method/trick to gain performance.
    Very informative. It's nice to know exactly how older cards use FSR compared to newer cards and some in depth information on how the fallback for FSR works.
    Reply
  • daworstplaya
    Modding community coming out with newer features before the Dev's even have a chance of integrating FSR. Hopefully this lights a fire under the Dev's to officially integrate FSR.
    Reply