it's not a new graphics card that you can't buy it's not even something that
belongs to one team or the other what you're getting today yes you
is an upgrade for the graphics card you already own AMD's new fidelity effects
super resolution may not be the only upscaling method out there but
dang it it's the only one that promises to run on graphics cards that launched
as many as five years ago but should you care
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we're going to start things off with image quality comparisons and we'll
explain exactly how we got there afterwards but first a disclaimer while
we would love to compare fidelity fx super resolution to NVIDIA's deep
learning super sampling unfortunately the only title that supports both right
now kings hunt is still in alpha and doesn't work on our bench yet so for
today we'll focus solely on fsr we'll be using an rx-6800xt on our GPU bench for
our testing though there's a small caveat of the seven games available at launch
we only have these five godfall therefore will be our main point of
comparison because it's both visually detailed and will let us test how fsr
impacts ray tracing but first lioness is a big anno fan so i can't
leave that out and keep my job can i at 4k you would be hard-pressed to
distinguish the ultra quality or even quality presets from native unless you
know where to look and it's good enough on balance that you'll rarely notice the difference
unless you're looking for shimmering artifacts on thin or geometry the
performance preset on the other hand starts to show some warts with even
non-moving thin geometry visibly losing detail but for a low motion game like
ano if it means you get to turn up the eye candy why wouldn't you
dropping the resolution to 1440p with the fsr preset to quality or below lets
some blur creep in with more significant shimmering thanks to the lower input
resolution wait what do i mean by lower resolution
well like dlss the lower the quality setting the lower the resolution the
game actually runs at so when you set the game to 1440p ultra quality the game
is actually running closer to 1080p that's why at 1080p i'm not recommending
going below the ultra quality preset unless you like a lot of blur
still it may be a better experience than running sub 1080p natively so pick your
poison i guess onto godfall
in this 4k static scene we get a good spread of edge cases to take into
consideration compared to native ultra quality looks
nearly indistinguishable which is awesome everything remains sharp and
there's little visible loss and texture detail if any with only minor issues
like the gold color detail work on this pillar the quality preset meanwhile
introduces some shimmering in finer details like the self shadows and the
silver means here and some details textures appear a little bit softer than
they should but it's not too noticeable unless you're looking too closely the
balance preset retains sharpness around hard edges remarkably well but textures
are suffering much more than before and the distant stairs begin to show some
unevenness in the upscale finally the performance preset using a 1080p input
resolution remember gives us much blurrier textures and a
more shimmery scene overall which could be distracting
critically those distant stairs are now blurring together because there's not
enough detail for the upscaler to properly display them hard edges with a lot of contrast are
headed very well but less contrasting edges are a lot blurrier than native
in motion these differences between the presets become even more noticeable
now graphically simpler games like king's hunt for example are far more
forgiving and the performance preset offers a surprisingly similar level of
detail to native you're mostly just losing detail on distant stairs and your
character's hair back to godfall here's the same scene at
1440p while textures are still pretty sharp at the ultra quality setting
shimmering becomes a bit more obvious on finer details as the roughly 1080p input
resolution lacks the pixels needed to reconstruct them this is minor though
and you really need to know where to look to pick them out quality preset on
the other hand becomes a lot rougher on those finer details notice the
shimmering here and the missing stairs or blurry tree leaves over here hard
edges do pretty well though and if you're in the middle of a fight you probably won't notice that you're not at
native revolution balanced straight off looks like an upscaled image with blurry
textures and fine details getting lost look at that fine gold trim turned into
a solid blob and performance preset
well there's only so much you can do with an input 720p image and it's remarkable
that it looks as good as it does static hard edges like the pillar itself look
alright but anything that moves like the glowing pauldron on the silver main
shoulder now also shimmers and fine details go out the window entirely still
it beats running at 720p with monitor scaling and compared to an m cable it's
noticeably sharper with more detail and you're getting it for free just like you
get stickers for free with purchase at lttstore.com now 1080p is kinda scraping
the barrel for fsr unfortunately with ultra quality providing okay results but
being visibly blurrier and less detailed than native particularly around the
sword and the pillar's trim the quality preset is as low as you
probably want to go for 1080p it looks like 1440p performance mode
which makes sense because like that mode it's actually using 720p for the input
resolution strangely enough balance doesn't look that much worse all things
considered but now even hard contrast areas like the ARM are beginning to show
some fuzz and performance well
it looks kind of like a 540p game on an xbox 360 or ps3
and that's because it is 540p hard contrast areas are still better than
that kind of upscaling would look but now to go along with a slight blur
we've got some halo artifacts this isn't really how i would want to
play the game but i mean if your only other option is to not play the game
this is a hundred percent improvement the 720p is pushing the envelope to a
frankly silly degree but it's an interesting demonstration of just how
much fsr differs from dss three clicks philip made a pretty
amazing video showing that going super low res with dlss can make an image look
high-res but strangely blurry fsr though
absolutely cannot which tells us everything we need to know about how it
works without even hearing the whole explanation but i'll tell you the whole explanation
anyway after we go over performance with ray tracing on at 4k our 6800xt
manages a massive 40 to 46 improvement over native just by switching fsr to
ultra quality going from consistently under 60 FPS to
consistently well over which is a pretty great deal if you ask me considering the
visual difference is basically indistinguishable unless you're really
really pixel hunt we're seeing pretty linear progression
down through the quality levels so depending on your pain tolerance for blurring you can squeeze quite a lot of
performance out of ssr at 4k at 1440p it
remains a linear improvement for a 6800 xt up until the balanced preset where
the improvement is within spinning distance of quality and performance
doesn't do much better still turning fsr on at ultra quality
will provide a more stable frame rate for 120hz displays so that might be
worth it not sure i'd go below quality at 1440p however but bear in mind that
this is a 6800 xt we're talking about and older gpus that struggle at 1440p
native may see better returns since it's probably the bottleneck not your CPU
1080p certainly sees almost no improvement on our 6800xt with
unpredictable results thanks to how CPU bound we're getting
but this brings up an important question why not just lower your settings
well smartypants some people don't want to and some people can't go any lower
because their GPU is too weak as for why you wouldn't just run at a
lower resolution and call it a day well
you could but then your monitor or GPU is probably going to use bi-linear
scaling which is way less sophisticated than the advanced techniques like edge
directing and even neural networks deployed by the likes of dlss
so why not use the best tools available and that begs the question
which tool dss is great if you have the hardware it
requires only found on select NVIDIA gpus of course fsr while being a little
heavier to run requires no special hardware and is substantially easier to
implement into a game engine easy enough that reportedly it took one developer
just under two hours after being given the code to implement it into their game
i mean in theory it could even be injected into a game by modders although
AMD wasn't sure if it would look correct this way when we asked so
your mileage may vary the effect is implemented as a shader that works by
using a combination of multiple scaling and sharpening techniques that are run
before the overlay effects like the hud which reduces noise and preserves text
christmas christmas
which reduces noise and preserves text crispness
under the hood developers are given control over the scaler's variables and
these can be updated on the fly no two implementations of fsr will look quite
the same assuming the developer hasn't just used the defaults
one thing for users to know though is that because there's a sharpening pass
included with fsr having other sharpening filters enabled can
ironically give the impression of more blurring than there really is thanks to
the ringer effects and this is probably why our first
impressions of AMD's computex reveal weren't exactly favorable
unfortunately as we've seen texture blurring and fine detail shimmering is
still a problem for fidelity fx super resolution today
but that doesn't mean it can't change remember how bad dlss 1.0 was well bnb
says we'll see new additions tweaks and new upscaling methods even in the future
all of which will be open to the industry it remains to be seen whether
this will work out for them or if this is another case of cuda versus opencl
where NVIDIA shot first and ultimately won
but developer support is pretty extensive with a lot of big names behind
fsr so my money's on things working out differently this time you won't know for
sure until it's been out a while but for now enjoy your free upgrade
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thanks for watching guys this was a bit different from our usual videos so
maybe check out our recent video on seeing if people at the office could tell whether rtx was on or not
spoiler i could tell but i also knew what to look for do you