AMD on Wednesday pulled back part of the curtain on FSR 2.0, the hotly anticipated upgrade of its FidelityFX Super Resolution spatial upscaler/supersampler (that distinction changes depending on the color of the logo).
FSR 2.0 promises to up your framerates for "free," as it were, the same promise made by competing technologies like Nvidia's deep-learning supersampling (DLSS). But which of these framerate-boosting techs will reign supreme? It's Big Green and Big Red, back at it again.
FidelityFX Super Resolution Gets an Upgrade
FSR 2.0, revealed as part of the annual Game Developers Conference, accomplishes this through "temporal upscaling," a technique that uses three different vector points in an image (provided to the algorithm by game developers) to upscale a downrendered image's sharpness and overall quality to appear as indistinguishable from native resolution as possible.
FSR 2.0, unlike DLSS 2.3, does not require any machine learning to train its algorithm. However its compatibility is a bit of a mess. What games, APIs, and graphics cards it will work with are all a matter of detail.
We recommend you head over to AMD's full FSR 2.0 blog to get a sense of what will work with what, but in essence: FSR 2.0 will be compatible with a range of GPUs from both AMD and Nvidia (much like FSR 1.0), as well as Xbox consoles, under a specific set of rules and resolutions depending on the underlying graphics chip you're using.
How Many Games Will FSR 2.0 Support at Launch?
Perhaps the critical blow to FSR 2.0 before it gets off the ground, though, may be that many (including us here at PCMag) were expecting FSR 2.0 to gift its most important component—support for the 1,000+ game-compatible Radeon Super Resolution (RSR)—to players everywhere.
Unfortunately, because of the per-game implementation, FSR 2.0 will be crippled by the same chains as FSR 1.0. Those limitations, even four years after launch, brought DLSS' total compatible number of titles to just around 150; game developers need to do the lifting.
AMD says that FSR 2.0 will require various levels of input from developers, depending on the engine. For example, if the game is already supporting DLSS, FSR 2.0 should slide right in. The same is true for games based on certain versions of Unreal Engine and Unity. The granularity continues no matter where you look—again, we recommend AMD's blog to get a grip on what the landscape for FSR 2.0 compatibility might look like for you.
Radeon Super Resolution, meanwhile, is compatible with thousands of games right out of the box. Like Nvidia Image Sharpener, both work using temporal movement image data to inform their algorithms. However in testing, it's shown that Radeon Super Resolution's image quality is closer to DLSS than NIS is by a wide margin, while DLSS ultimately still leads the pack in quality of the bunch. If FSR 2.0's quality can someday combine with RSR 1.0's game compatibility, Nvidia's DLSS has a real threat on its hands.
Right now, though, we have evidence of just a single title running FSR 2.0: Deathloop. AMD says we can expect to flip the feature on in that one title "sometime in Q2 2022," which is ominously too reminiscent of the original DLSS announcement, where it was shown running on just one game, Battlefield V (but announced for two, including Final Fantasy XV).
So, will it be another four years before FSR 2.0 can claim a library of just 150 supported games? Gamers and AMD alike should hope not!