AMD has announced its next-gen upscaling box of tricks to make frame rates smoother with PC games at GDC 2024.
This is FSR 3.1, and it sounds like a big step forward - and not just for the quality of the upscaling tech, since there’s a surprise in tow for Nvidia (and Intel Arc) GPU owners.
The basics outlined by AMD are that in terms of better image quality, FSR 3.1 will boast ‘improved temporal stability’ which means fewer flickering or shimmering effects and less ‘fizziness’ around objects that are moving. There’ll be a reduction in the level of ghosting seen, too.
FSR 3.1 will provide a cleaner image overall, in short, and we’ll also get better preservation of detail, AMD asserts.
What about the surprise we mentioned? This is “decoupling FSR 3 upscaling from frame generation” so they are separate entities, and as AMD makes clear, this means that frame generation (adding additional artificial frames for a smoother frame rate) could work with other upscaling solutions.
AMD tells us that the first game to use FSR 3.1 will be Insomniac’s Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, and it’ll be delivered in an update for the game later this year (sadly we don’t get any idea of a precise timeframe).
FSR 3.1 should be available to game developers from Q2, meaning next month.
Support for Vulkan and the Xbox Game Development Kit is also inbound, and AMD notes a new FidelityFX API will make it “easier for developers to debug” and provide forward compatibility with updated versions of FSR.
Analysis: DLSS turbocharger for older Nvidia GPUs
Better image quality is clearly welcome with FSR 3.1 – even if some feel AMD has been pretty slow to act implementing improvements on this front – but the decoupling of frame generation is equally important.
This means that a PC gamer using Nvidia’s DLSS upscaling could draft in AMD’s frame generation to further rev up frame rates. Okay, so Lovelace GPU owners get DLSS 3 frame generation anyway, but those who don’t have an RTX 4000 graphics card can use DLSS but layer AMD’s frame generation on top, at least in theory. (Remember, while DLSS 3.5 may support older Nvidia GPUs with ray reconstruction, Team Green’s frame generation is still only available to RTX 4000 graphics cards).
Or those with an Intel Arc graphics card making use of XeSS upscaling could do the same thing, of course. AMD has tried to stay as open as possible with FSR and this is another commendable move in that respect.
We’ll need to see all this in action before we can really draw conclusions about how far AMD has advanced with version 3.1 of FSR, and it might be a bit of a wait yet before that happens.
Via VideoCardz
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