FSR 2.0 Is Coming To Xbox Series X/S and Xbox One, Already In Testing

In a new Tweet by the GPUOpen team and Xbox's Jason Ronald, AMD's Fidelity FX Super Resolution 2 is dropping its PC exclusivity and is making its way to Xbox consoles soon. Xbox development teams have already received the upscaler and are actively testing it right now for future deployment in games. Xbox consoles receiving FSR 2.0 support include the Xbox Series X and S, as well as the previous-gen Xbox One console.

Besides the Steam Deck, FSR 2.0 integration with Xbox marks the first time AMD's new temporal upscaling will be used outside of the PC ecosystem. Time will tell how prominent FSR will become in Xbox games, but there is huge potential for version 2.0 of the tech to be a big hit on Microsoft's gaming console.

Resolution upscalers are incredibly common to see on consoles such as the Xbox. Due to the incredibly long lifespan some of these consoles have, upscaling is almost a necessity for ensuring the console's GPU does not become obsolete within a few years. Almost all Xbox (and PlayStation) games have some form of upscaling whether that be a competing temporal solution (that isn't FSR) or checkerboarding in order to hit a target frame rate of 30, 60 or even 120 fps on current-gen consoles at higher resolutions.

We can't say how much better FSR 2.0 will look on consoles, but presumably its temporal algorithm to be at least on par with competing for temporal solutions already on the latest Xbox games, and almost certainly better than checkerboarding with its more simplistic upscaling algorithm.

But, the biggest hurdle will be in developer integration of FSR 2.0 which could be quite probablematic for many titles. FSR 2.0 more advanced temporal solution requires additional data, that might not already be included in the game engine, including depth buffers, motion vectors, and color buffers. This additional data can take much longer to implement than FSR 2.0 itself, which will extend the development time of FSR 2.0 implementation. 

The only exception to this will be games that already include a temporal upscaling solution, meaning these additional data points will already be available in the game engine. All the developers need to do is add the FSR 2.0 source code to the engine.

Perhaps the most surprising announcement from the tweets is FSR 2.0 integration with Xbox One and its much older hardware compared to the Series X and S. On the PC side of things, FSR 2.0 already has a quite rigorous minimum GPU requirement at 4K with an RX 5700 and RTX 2070, and a GTX 1080 and RX 6500 XT for 1440P, making us wonder if the Xbox One's GPU can handle such a compute-heavy upscaler.

It will be interesting to see how performance shapes up with FSR 2.0, but if Microsoft has greenlit support for the Xbox One, it must believe this older console can handle FSR 2.0's heavy computing requirements without a problem. We fully expect Series X and S to benefit greatly from FSR 2.0 though, with GPUs powered on the same RDNA2 architecture as the RX 6000 series desktop GPUs from AMD.