AMD Finally LAUNCHES Fidelity FX, A Worthy DLSS Competitor?

RJ Pierce, Tech Times 22 June 2021, 11:06 am

AMD is trying to go for NVIDIA's jugular, but are they actually offering a good competitor to DLSS?

FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) just launched today with their latest Adrenalin 2020 driver package. As their answer to the well-received NVIDIA DLSS, FSR promises as much as a 2.4x improvement in overall frame rates at resolutions as high as 4K on select games, writes Windows Central.

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BEIJING, CHINA - DECEMBER 06: The headquarters of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) is pictured on December 6, 2020 in Beijing, China.

For now, AMD is offering FidelityFX to these games only: "Godfall," "Anno 1800," "Evil Genius 2," "22 Racing Series," "Kingshunt," "Terminator: Resistance," and "The Riftbreaker." But with how Team Red promised that FSR would be supported on a much wider variety of hardware, you can expect this game library to grow in the foreseeable future.

WCCFTech reports on a good number of the games rumored to get FSR support in the coming months. Here is the list:

"Asterigos"
"Baldur's Gate III"
"DOTA 2"
"Edge of Eternity"
"Far Cry 6"
"Farming Simulator 2022"
"Forspoken"
"Myst"
"Necromunda: Hired Gun"
"Resident Evil: Village"
"Swordsman Remake"
"Vampire the Masquerade: Manhunt"

These games are still not confirmed to get FSR support from upcoming AMD driver packages, however. So, it would be best to temper expectations until the games are formally announced.

To round things up, a total of 44 more developers have also declared FidelityFX support for their games, as reported by VideoCardz. The list is quite extensive, so it won't be included here in its entirety, but a few of the most notable include Crystal Dynamics, Ubisoft, Capcom, and Electronic Arts/DICE.

As for the hardware support, AMD announced in their Computex 2021 keynote that FidelityFX will be supported on RX 5000, RX 6000, and even cards as old as the RX Vega and RX 500 series. Zen-based APUs are also supported. And while Team Red demonstrated the software on an NVIDIA GTX 1060, they did say that support for NVIDIA cards will come a bit later.

AMD FidelityFX: A Worthy DLSS Competitor?

When NVIDIA launched DLSS with their first-generation RTX cards, they gave gamers an opportunity to improve frame rates on high resolutions (while also having ray tracing turned on). They managed to do this by using AI to render games at a lower resolution, then upscale it to higher resolutions without the performance penalty of native resolution rendering.

But the thing is, DLSS is hardware-locked to RTX graphics cards. That's why when AMD announced that FSR will be able to run on NVIDIA GPUs, it caused a massive stir. Now that it's launched, though, does it live up to the hype?

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A group of PC graphics cards, including (L-R) a Zotac GeForce GTX 1060 AMP Edition, MSI Radeon RX 470 Gaming X 8G and an AMD Radeon RX 480 8GB, taken on July 22, 2016.

The short answer is, not really. But it does deliver on major frame rate bumps, more so on high resolutions. Digital Trends did a performance review of FSR on its currently supported games, and the FPS increase is pretty significant but not at the level that fans hoped. In many games, players can expect double the frame rates if they choose the "Performance" option.

For now, the biggest opportunity for AMD and FidelityFX is its potential arrival to next-gen consoles, which both feature CPUs and GPUs from Team Red.

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Written by RJ Pierce