The latest update to F1 22, patch 1.17 (opens in new tab), brings several important upgrades to last season's F1 game. Most notably, the colors of George Russell's W13 wheel arches have been updated, followed by the introduction of AMD's latest FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) version 2.2.

With FSR 2.2 in hand, one can expect a small improvement in gaming performance. I have been testing the upgraded upscaling features for the past few hours, and on my AMD machine, games ran about 11% faster in FSR 2.2 balanced mode compared to FSR 1.0 balanced mode using TAA and FidelityFX Sharpening

FSR 1.2's balanced mode was about 11% faster than FSR 1.0's balanced mode with TAA and FidelityFX Sharpening.

Comparing FSR 2.2 performance to running the game without upscaling, the frame rate improved by 139%. But surely we have turned on the upscaling technology by now?

But here is something to keep in mind. When we tested both upscalers with performance mode enabled, they both performed similarly. In fact, FSR 1.0 seems to have a slightly faster minimum frame time than the newer version. Nevertheless, the visual quality of FSR 2.2 has improved, with the resulting image being sharper and some details better preserved, such as the driver's glove.

FSR 2.2 looks quite good for what is essentially a clever approximation of the frame FSR 2.2 looks quite good for what is essentially a clever approximation of the frame. Certainly, the improvement does not show up well in the following compressed images.

FSR 2.2 uses an entirely new temporal algorithm (opens in new tab) for upscaling, replacing the spatial algorithm found in the original version of FSR. It generally works very well, and AMD has integrated several other features into the second version of the upscaling technique, including measures to reduce ghosting of fast-moving objects. FSR 2.2 also uses a temporal upscaler, which completely replaces the need for temporal anti-aliasing (TAA).

Since I am running the game on an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT (open in new tab) and an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X (open in new tab), RDNA specific acceleration to help the upscaling algorithm and boost performance ( Open in new tab) will be seen; FSR 2.2 will also run on Nvidia and Intel graphics cards, but the performance gains may be somewhat different.

If you are using an Nvidia graphics card and it is one of the recent RTX models, you can also turn on DLSS upscaling in-game. In my previous F1 22 performance test (open in new tab), it was FSR that seemed to be the more stable of the two technologies, but both handle the fast pace of the game slightly differently, so it is worth trying DLSS and FSR yourself if you can.

One of my concerns with F1 22 is keeping frame times consistently high for smoother, more consistent racing, and upscaling technologies like FSR and DLSS do just that. Without them, there would be a significant performance (open in new tab) penalty for the raytraced beauty.