AMD Talks FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.2, ISV Engagement

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The most successful FidelityFX feature
 

Along with the announcement of the RDNA 3 architecture and the Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards, AMD also briefed us on its gaming and ISV (independent software vendor) relations and the adoption of some of its GPUOpen technologies. We also have another article on the Radeon Software and Platform ecosystem. Check out those articles for additional content, but let's talk about FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) — by far the most successful of AMD's FidelityFX offerings to date.

After just over a year since FSR 1.0 first became available, and about six months since FSR 2.0 arrived, AMD says FSR is now in 218 games, with more to come. It has a website tracking the list of FSR-enabled games (note that you'll want to click on Super Resolution, as the list also tracks games with other FidelityFX features). The list is apparently not complete, as I counted only 106 games while writing this — and it also doesn't list FSR 2.1 support for Cyberpunk 2077, which just arrived, or Forza Horizon 5's recently released FSR 2.2 support.

There are 23 games with FSR 2 or later currently shown, so that's at least 25 total counting the latest additions. By comparison, there are only 46 games that use FidelityFX CAS (Contrast Aware Sharpening), five with FidelityFX Ambient Occlusion, four with Variable Shading, five with Denoiser, one that uses the HDR Mapper, eight with Downsampler, and one that uses FidelityFX Screen Space Reflections. All of those combined are thus only about a quarter of the number of FSR-enabled games.

AMD also pointed out how FSR has been gaining ground on DLSS, but we do have to note that FSR 1.0 integration is far easier since it uses spatial upscaling — and it also doesn't look nearly as good as FSR 2. Nearly all of the DLSS-enabled games are now using DLSS 2 or later, which is the real competition for AMD, which means at present there are about ten times as many games with DLSS 2 (or DLSS 3) as there are FSR 2-enabled titles.
 
New to the party is FSR 2.2, which offers further tuning of the FSR 2 algorithm to help eliminate ghosting on fast moving objects. Forza Horizon 5 got official public support for FSR 2.2 on November 8, and in limited testing on one GPU, things didn't seem to be working properly. In related news, the same patch also added DLSS 2 support — which is great and makes perfect sense, as FSR 2 and DLSS 2 both take the same core inputs: z-buffer, motion vectors, current frame, and the previous frame(s).

With Nvidia now promoting DLSS 3's Frame Generation feature, AMD is also looking to answer with FSR 3 sometime next year. It will use "Fluid Motion Frames" to generate an additional frame, and like DLSS 3 it will potentially add (at least) one frame of latency while boosting framerates. There aren't any games with FSR 3 support announced just yet, but we'll be keeping an eye on it in the coming months.

We're also curious to see if AMD will stick to its "works everywhere" approach, as we've seen with FSR 1 and FSR 2. Nvidia made a lot of comments about the need for the Optical Flow Accelerator in its Ada Lovelace GPUs to support DLSS 3, though there are questions about whether it's truly required and whether the OFA in Ampere might be sufficient. AMD does have some AI Accelerator functionality in its RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 architectures, and perhaps those could be of use with FSR 3, but it seems likely the company will try to keep the support "universal."
 
AMD also talked about its support for DirectStorage 1.1, which should be available soon and should run on all RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 graphics cards. It will also work with Nvidia RTX cards and Intel Arc GPUs. Now, all we really need is the public release of games that actually support the feature. I for one would love to see stuff like Flight Simulator leverage DS1.1 and perhaps cut down loading times from well over a minute to perhaps just a few seconds. Make it so, Microsoft!

And AMD also talked about working with various companies to get its tech adopted in gaming engines. That obviously happens with Nvidia and Intel as well, but ultimately the proof is in the eating of the pudding, and the bigger your slice of the graphics card market, the easier it is to get ISVs to use your features. It's one of the big advantages Nvidia continues to have, as its GPUs account for 75–80 percent of the gaming market, according to Steam's Hardware Survey.

The full slide deck is below for those who want to dig further into the details of what AMD covered on these topics.
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