Digital Foundry FSR vs DLSS vs Native

[the-pi-guy]

sauce

AMD's Fidelity FX Super Resolution 2.0 has arrived and the first title to sport the technique is Arkane's wonderful Deathloop, a game already shown to benefit immensely from reconstruction-based upscaling. Reconstruction is what separates FSR 2.0 from its less complex 1.0 predecessor: rather than interpolate out extra detail from the current frame with variable but often unsatisfying results, FSR 2.0 is similar to other modern temporal super-sampling techniques, injecting/reconstructing detail from prior frames into the current one to improve quality while adding anti-aliasing properties too. FSR 2.0 is also open source in nature, meaning that developers can slot it into their games free of charge, with minimal development time.

While we've seen techniques similar to FSR 2.0 in the console space for many years, the quality is such that it can rightfully take its place amongst the most recent second generation upscalers, such as Unreal Engine's Temporal Super Resolution (TSR), as seen in UE5. While the likes of DLSS 1.0, checkerboard rendering, and older forms of TAA upscaling aim to produce native-like image quality at roughly half the internal resolution, FSR 2.0 and other second-gen techniques target similar quality from just a quarter of the resolution, with a 4K output from a 1080p base image often put forward as the sweet spot. DLSS and Intel's upcoming XeSS utilise machine learning via specialised onboard hardware but FSR uses the compute power of the GPU itself, meaning that it should on run any modern graphics card. As you'll see, we successfully ran FSR 2.0 on the venerable Radeon RX 580 and Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1060.

Using 4K as an output resolution, performance and quality modes use the same internal resolution as DLSS: 1080p and 1440p respectively. Meanwhile, the balanced mode (2259x1270) uses a slightly higher resolution than DLSS balanced mode (2227 x1253).

[Legend]

Sounds pretty encouraging.

Native rendering is dying fast. I think it'll only be a few years before some PC games don't even officially support it, just like how supersampling for anti-aliasing is not always officially supported.

Almost everything has been moving towards the concept of "just render something good and fix it in post." Image upscaling, vr reprojection to increase framerates, screen space reflections, screen space shadows, screen space ambient occlusion, etc. Even on the raytracing side denoisers are super powerful. Will be really cool to see where things are in 10 years.

[nnodley]

I had dlss set up in my game before I moved over to unreal 5. It worked pretty good. I need to get it implemented again to help support lower end pc builds. Lumen still is only compatible with the gtx 1070 and higher.