AMD this week made select capabilities of its FidelityFX package available to Microsoft Xbox Series X|S developers. For Xbox Series X|S, AMD makes available FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS), Variable Shading, and ray-traced shadow Denoiser technologies, which are already supported by numerous PC games.
AMD's FidelityFX is a collection of technologies that can greatly enhance visual quality of games or improve their performance without noticeable degradation of image quality. AMD has introduced eight FidelityFX technologies.
- Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS)
- Combined Adaptive Compute Ambient Occlusion (CACAO)
- Variable Rate Shading (VRS)
- Stochastic Screen Space Reflections (SSSR)
- Ray-traced shadow Denoiser
- AMD's Luminance Preserving Mapper for HDR-supporting FreeSync Premium Pro monitors
- Single Pass Downsampler (SPD)
- Parallel Sort (optimized version of the radix sort algorithm)
So far, game developers have implemented support for CAS, CACAO, and SPD on PCs, but eventually AMD expects developers to adopt more technologies from the package. One of the most anticipated FidelityFX technologies is AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), a rival for Nvidia's DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling). Unfortunately, this technology is currently not supported either on PC or Xbox X|S.
Making ingredients from the FidelityFX package available on Microsoft's latest game consoles has a lot of rationale for AMD. Firstly, the consoles come in two configurations and it is easier for developers to make sure everything works on them as they do not have to test over a dozen of different RDNA/RDNA2-based graphics cards that are used by gamers. This is barely important for those 40 games that already support CAS (as well as CACAO and SPD) on Windows PCs, but for those titles that yet have to support CAS, variable shading, and ray-traced shadow denoiser supporting them on consoles first makes quite a lot of sense.
Secondly, at around 4.5 million consoles sold to date, Microsoft's Xbox Series X|S have a larger installed base that AMD's entire RDNA2 lineup, so game developers are more inclined to use the collection of FidelityFX technologies (well, three of them at this point) for the new consoles rather than for the latest graphics cards. Of course, it would make even more sense for AMD to get its FidelityFX to the latest Xbox Series X|S and to PlayStation 5 (i.e., to over 11.5 million systems) to popularize the package, but right now the collection seems to be a more PC centric.
Earlier AMD said that it was going to support arguably the most anticipated FidelityFX Super Resolution technology available on all RDNA/RDNA2 platforms, which includes PCs running AMD's Radeon RX 5000 and Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs, Microsoft's Xbox Series X|S, and Sony's PlayStation 5. Meanwhile, the company has not disclosed when it plans to roll out its FSR.
