Today marks the launch of AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), meaning that AMD has finally unleashed its new upscaling technology on the gaming world. Using the new "advanced edge reconstruction" and sharpening, the Red Team hopes to offer an alternative to Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), but more importantly, to give older GPU owners a slight boost in endgame performance

FSS is a newer, more powerful, and more powerful GPU.

At the heart of FSR is upscaling technology. Low-resolution images, such as 1440p for example, are upscaled to 4K using fancy algorithms created by AMD.

AMD divides this into two stages. First, the game is rendered at a lower resolution, which provides the expected performance gains due to the smaller number of pixels to process. Then, FSR uses spatial upscaling to upscale the frames to 4K, which uses advanced edge reconstruction algorithms and further sharpening to improve image quality.

The result is an image that has a 1440p performance hit (plus a slight overhead due to FSR, a few percentage points in our own testing), but looks more like a native 4K image than one would expect. [But the devil is in the details, and how close to native 4K is AMD's real challenge. If you want to see how close you can actually get, check out AMD's full FSR test.

FSR and DLSS, while superficially functionally similar, are actually two very different approaches to solving the same problem, and as we have heard from both AMD and Nvidia, the main differentiator is that FidelityFX Super Resolution has no machine learning or AI, which it does not have.

This may or may not be a good thing, but for AMD, it has the advantage of being able to run FSR on a wide range of graphics cards, even Nvidia's. AMD has a wide range of graphics cards, from the latest 6000 series (including mobile) to all RX 480/470/460 Radeon GPUs, and Nvidia RTX 30 series through 10 series GPUs, stating that they have tested FSR on these GPUs.

AMD states that overhead and the ratio of FSR cost to total frame cost can run FSR on low-end devices, although it may reduce returns, since, according to AMD, FSR performance should not be affected much, At the very least, it won't put a strain on older CPUs; if the CPU is fps-limited, FSR won't contribute much to performance gains.

But you never know unless you use it; AMD FSR will be available at launch in Anno 1800, Evil Genius 2, Godfall, Kingshunt, 22 Racing Series, and Terminator: on/off in the options menu. The option menu can be toggled on and off. You can also decide the FSR quality preset from there, which determines whether FSR will maximize frame or fidelity.

According to AMD, more games will support FSR by the end of the year, including DOTA 2, Far Cry 6, and Resident Evil Village. This could bode well for future games by the same developer