AMD released a new featurette this week to show off its new Radeon RX and Ryzen hardware while running Far Cry 6 to demonstrate the performance of its new AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), and the results were pretty impressive.
Granted, the video was specifically designed to show FSR at its best, but the video showed off its real time ray tracing chops, as well as showing a 40% to 45% improvement in frames per second with FSR turned on, which is definitely not nothing.
AMD and Nvidia are in an escalating fight over whose super sampling technology has better performance, has better third-party support, and so on – so we definitely see why AMD would want to flex its muscles a bit. The company's tech it has come a long way after having to play catch up in the last generation when Nvidia rolled out ray tracing and Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) resolution upscaling with its Turing GPUs which AMD had no real answer for.
Whether FSR can consistently improve performance north of 40% remains to be seen, and we've definitely got those floating doubt bubbles over our heads as far as that goes. This marketing featurette needs to be taken with a healthy bit of salt, since AMD isn't about to show off a sizzle reel with jerky framerates and lackluster performance, which it could have been getting behind the scenes.
That said, reports have been generally positive about AMD's FSR, both from developers and those players who have tried it out, so you should still definitely see an improvement. When Far Cry 6 launches on October 7, we'll be able to see for ourselves how well AMD's FSR technology fares in one of the most highly anticipated, and demanding, AAA releases of the year.
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Since most consumers' graphics cards don't have support for any super sampling technology yet, and may not get a GPU that does, these comparisons at the upper echelons of graphics capability might not even concern the PC gaming majority – but it's still worth paying attention to.
Nvidia's DLSS is chained to its RTX cards, so the GTX 1060, currently the most popular graphics card in use according to the most recent Steam Hardware Survey for August 2021, has kind of been left on the vine.
Those gamers, builders, and enthusiasts who had been holding off on upgrading until the release of the new Nvidia Ampere and AMD RDNA 2 have spent the past year trying to find a card, any card, that they could upgrade to as stock simply hasn't kept pace with the demand – not to mention all the bots and cryptomining operations soaking up huge swaths of the supply.
But while Nvidia's DLSS is only for RTX cards, AMD is promising that its FSR technology will be accessible not just on previous generation cards, but even some older cards from archrival Nvidia, like the GTX 1060.
For a lot of gamers, AMD's FSR might be the only super sampling tech in town, and at least there will be some capacity to improve gaming performance. Given how chasing down stock drops both online and off is getting downright Sisyphean, we're might have to take our performance improvement where we can get them.
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