AMD and Nvidia are playing a cat and mouse game. When one announces a new upscaling technology, the other follows suit: DLSS followed by FSR; Frame Generation followed by Frame Generation (AMD style); and so on. You get the idea. Traditionally, we have thought that Nvidia would lead and AMD would follow, but Aaron Steinman of AMD thinks otherwise.

"I would be curious to know if Nvidia feels they have to do what we have done by making some of these solutions driver-based," Steinman said.

The driver-based technologies Steinman is referring to are AMD Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF), which will begin previewing later this month, and Radeon Super Resolution (RSR), which is already available. These two technologies, unlike AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), do not require developers to support them in their games. They will work in most games to some degree. [Since DLSS is only available in certain solutions, Nvidia would need to benefit from our open source, cross-vendor solution or do something similar. [For example, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. This game offers AMD Frame Generation and FSR 3; DLSS is not supported, so Nvidia GPU owners will have to use AMD's upscaling technology instead. Of course, that is easy enough to do, since AMD's upscaling technology is not proprietary and will work on most cards of reasonable enough age, but what is the relationship with Nvidia?

To be fair to Nvidia, the company does offer a driver-based upscaling option called Nvidia Image Scaling. This is a much simpler upscaling technique than DLSS with AI built in, relying instead on a sharpening filter to improve final image clarity. However, Nvidia does not have a driver-based version of its frame generation technology, which is paired exclusively with DLSS 3.

After all, we need to see how well AFMF works on any old game before we decide to camp outside Nvidia's headquarters to request a green team version.

We tried the latest preview version on Framework 13 with a Ryzen 7 7840U and it pushed Baldur's Gate 3 running on FSR 2 Balanced from about 30 fps on High to a pretty solid 60 fps. And it looks really good. So it definitely looks promising. [So that means the competition is never-ending. We will have new technology and they will have new technology," Steinman said. [At least neither company will back down unless they go bankrupt, and looking at their financials after the AI boom, I don't see that happening anytime soon; at CES, most companies were talking about AI. I asked Steinman if he thought we would see more AI acceleration on gaming GPUs over time.

"I think so. That is definitely a trend we will see."

AI-accelerated features feel like the inevitable next step for AMD's Radeon division, and that includes new additions from CES 2024, such as RTX Video HDR, which the company has already made to its AI-powered Nvidia product quite which would see it match the stack.

_____________________________________ PC Gamer's CES 2024 coverage is courtesy of Asus Republic of Gamers.