you want a faster GPU how do you get one
well instead of turning your air conditioning into a chiller AMD wants
you to fiddle with the settings uh
yeah according to them you can get 40
more performance out of your existing hardware without spending a dime and AMD
sponsored this video so that we could go through their numbers and explain to you
how to do it
all right let's imagine you're AMD and you're trying to make the next fastest
GPU in the world what do you do well in the past you leaned on two
things to increase your performance more transistors and if that didn't work more
power the problem is adding more transistors
and power will be impossible unless you want to enter big dumb territory at this
point right now high-end gpus draw close to
500 watts you know what also draws 500
watts this 500 watt space heater
unlike Linus my computer room isn't very big so in the summer i have to seriously
undervolt my system to avoid poaching in my own sweat until i move there's just
no way that i'm buying a card with an over 350 watt TDP i'm sure i'm not the
only one even if the raw heat output isn't a problem people in the office
have actually heated their homes by mining in the winter so i guess it's a
feature not a bug in north america we've got garbage 120
volt power out of most of our outlets meaning that from a single circuit you
can get 1800 watts max we're actually
getting close to the point where desktops will need a dedicated circuit
like forget plugging in a blender or a vacuum on the same circuit as your pc
now in europe they use 240 volt power so overloading a circuit is less of a
problem for them however european wars
have been pretty bad for energy prices lately and they've gone from high to
absolutely insane if gpus get any more
power hungry it could get to the point where around a freaking war zone is
gonna noticeably affect your power bill all right so if we can't feasibly add
more power then we're gonna need more transistors and this is typically
accomplished by physically shrinking the transistors i'm sure you're familiar by
now with terms like 12 nanometer seven nanometer five nanometer and so on and
so forth the problem is that the cost of developing new process nodes has gone
from very expensive to oh my god that's
a lot of money now to be clear chip makers are willing
to make those investments but the process nodes are going to start
sticking around for longer to ensure that they get a return
AMD was able to get around this a bit by switching to 3d chip stacking in the
5800x3d and i'm sure we'll be seeing way more 3d chip architectures in the future
but that still isn't going to help us completely break the laws of physics
we are getting scary close to the point where if you make transistors smaller
quantum tunneling becomes a big problem now i'm not going to pretend to fully
understand quantum tunneling but basically if the transistors are too
small the electrons will sometimes just pass straight through have that happen a
couple of times and mr blue screen is going to be paying you a visit
all of this is to say then that in the future we're going to have to make games
run faster by working smarter rather than harder and the first way that AMD
is doing this is with smart access memory or sam the tl didn't watch about
sam is that if you have an AMD CPU and a GPU
go enable it right now and you could get a 5 to 10 performance improvement in
many games how did AMD do this well in the past a CPU could only access
256 megabytes of the GPU's vram at a
time which was fine back when you were sneakily watching new grounds on the
school computers but in 2022 your CPU
should be able to access gigabytes of vram at a time and with smart access
memory you can do just that to enable smart access memory simply hop
into the BIOS make a detour to make sure that docp is enabled by the way that's a
tech tip and then click this button right up here that says resize bar
i don't know how common this button is so you might have to head over to
advanced mode go to advanced pci subsystem settings and enable above 4g
decoding then set resize bar support to auto and boom
now your games run faster and you didn't have to spend any money you can
celebrate by picking up a swag at ltdstore.com
now sam might have been able to get frodo to mount doom nice joke love it by
the way but it might not be enough to get you the frame rates that you're
looking for that's where fidelity affects super resolution and Radeon
super resolution come in they're both essentially the same idea except that
fsr is optimized for specific gains and leaves hud elements at native resolution
while rsr is implemented in the drivers and can be used on any game we'll be
using fsr for the rest of the video unless i'm specifically talking about
rsr basically what fsr does is render the
game at a lower resolution then use a combination of ai and sharpening to fill
back in the lost pixels this can give you a massive increase in performance
like 10 to 50 depending on your settings
but it does come with the caveat that you're going to be decreasing image
quality the question is by how much
and this is where i'd like to shout out AMD for a second typically for this kind
of testing i would just set up a single computer and only test on that but AMD
actually sent us over three systems to target three different popular gaming
resolutions and the results between the different resolutions tell a really
interesting story first of all at 1080p
you should only use fsr or rsr if you
absolutely have to even slight downgrades in resolution can
lead to an image that's softer than 10 ply toilet paper so if you need that
extra 20 of performance you should try and get it by dropping the in-game
settings rather than enabling fsr i'll put some examples on the screen but
realistically youtube compression is going to have its day with it so unless
you're subscribed on Floatplane this might not be that meaningful to you
at 1440p however it's more of a mixed bag depending on the game assassin's
creed valhalla for example looks great with rsr enabled with a nearly
imperceptible loss in image quality during the majority of your gameplay
tiny tina's wonderland and horizon zero dawn are less favorable due to how fsr
works however tiny tina's wonderland a borderlands offshoot has hard black
lines around basically everything which can become a nightmare for aliasing and
in a lot of situations can end up looking worse than if you didn't enable
it at all horizon zero dawn on the other hand has everything close to the player
looking great but the benchmark has a lot of stone textures that can start
looking a little strange in the distance fsr can have some trouble deciding what
to do with a line about a pixel thick when it's upscaling and this is
especially true if it's on a moving object and this is especially true at
lower quality settings should that pixel be light should it be
dark it's hard to say given the amount of information that it has to go off of
this is compounded by the fact that fsr 1.0 has no temporal component it just
sees the frame as it is with no knowledge of what came before or what is
expected to come after which can lead to shimmering like i mentioned before where
a pixel with a fine black line can actually change from light to dark frame
by frame AMD knows however that the lack of
temporal information is a problem with fsr 1.0 compared to its competitors and
they've actually included temporal information in the recently released fsr
2.0 that tech looks really promising
based on the small amount of testing that i've seen but currently it's not
supported in many games unlike rsr that can be enabled for any title through
Radeon software back to testing 4k is where fsr 1.0
really seems to come into its own here we've got enough pixels that even a
6950xt sometimes struggles to keep frame rates
high if you also want to turn up your details and fsr is getting enough pixels
in to spit a good image out my complaints in tiny tina's wonderland and
horizon zero dawn are basically gone with the small lines and textures
getting rendered with almost zero weirdness and while if you're really
looking for it you might be able to find some shimmering in the distance
you'd have to be playing one hell of an unimmersive game for you to be
distracted enough by it to notice anything going wrong
my main takeaways though are that you should absolutely enable smart access
memory and if you're gaming at 1440p or 4k
at least give fsr a try it works on AMD
and NVIDIA gpus i mean heck even Intel integrated ones so if your poor older
GPU is struggling this could be a way to claw back some frames it's probably a
lot better than letting your monitor do the upskilling that's for sure
so huge thanks to AMD for sponsoring this video if you guys enjoyed it maybe
go check out our play button pc really that's an odd one to throw too
it's a good video go check it out