It might be fair to say that Nvidia's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) tech started with a bit of a whimper but is currently going with a bang. As well as the big step up in quality seen in the transition from v1 to v2 (announced about a year ago), it seems to be gaining significant developer momentum in recent months. Meanwhile, AMD Radeon GPU owners, particularly those lucky enough to own a hardware ray tracing enabled RNDA 2 graphics card can only will AMD's developers to get a move on, so they can reap similar high resolution game accelerating benefits.
Official AMD slide mentioning FSR
AMD's DLSS-alike technology is officially called 'AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution' but from here on in I'll be calling it FSR for short, as that seems to be the commonplace abbreviation. Twitter and YouTube tech leakster Coreteks has shared a bit of a scoop with regard to FSR, if it turns out to be true.
Coreteks asserts that several developers have confirmed the information about FSR he has shared, but due to subtle differences in versions being distributed from AMD to devs he has had to hold back some data to protect source anonymity (is AMD that sneaky or is it just paranoia?). Key revelations are contained in the slide, from the Coreteks video, embedded below.
Interestingly, FSR is said to be implemented early on in the graphics pipeline, rather than bolted onto the end, like Nvidia's solution. It is set to be an open standard and work with any brand of GPU, it is claimed, and in this way it is hoped AMD FSR will eventually pull ahead in the race to being the standard, most widespread 'super resolution' tech – in an analogue to how the G-Sync vs FreeSync race played out. One must also remember that AMD GPUs power the popular Xbox and PlayStation consoles. Nvidia GPUs power the Switch, but Switch games and PC games aren't as tightly interwoven.
The headlining aspect of FSR is that it is touted by Coreteks as "launching soon," – in June this year. Back in mid-March AMD's VP of the Graphics Business Unit, Scott Herkelman, went on the record with PC World's Full Nerd to say that he wanted to see FSR launch this year, but it wasn't a certainty. "We want to bring it to market this year," said Herkelman. "We believe we can do it this year, but at the same time we still have a lot of work to do." As a counterpoint to that none-too-positive statement, the AMD exec did say that FSR technology is making "good progress."
Weighing up the sources, new and old, it might be more likely that we will see/hear more about AMD FSR in the next few weeks, but it doesn't really look likely that it will be ready for prime-time in such a short timescale.
