AMD Radeon Super Resolution vs. FidelityFX Usability & Image Quality Comparison

[Music] so things are starting to get a little bit confusing in the upscaling and super resolution space we have dlss obviously fsr there's now rsr which is what we're talking about today and there are older technologies like vsr and dsr and then just more traditional upscaling with all those technologies then we need to start doing some revisits it's been a little while since we've done image quality comparisons today we're back with that we're focusing on native resolution comparisons to fsr and to rsr or radeon super resolution amd has been using the phrase super resolution for a while now to define a few different things before they fully released everything and now it's time to look at how they all compare before that this video is brought to you by the montex sentry 850 gold power supply the sentry 850 watt is an 80 plus gold certified power supply also available in 550 watt and 650 watt capacities at generally competitive prices with the rest of the market the sentry 850 watt includes a five-year warranty two eps 12 volt connectors six pcie cables and plenty of peripheral cables making it easy to scale this modular power supply up or down for your build learn more at the link in the description below to make things really clear then amd has just officially launched radeon super resolution in the last couple of days or rsr in terms of image processing fidelity fx super resolution which is called fsr in short and rsr or radeon super resolution those two are literally the same math they're the same algorithm rsr uses the fsr math and backend to do everything that it's doing and that's stated by amd itself as well so this is well documented at this point now evasar is a feature that has to be added per game by the developers so this is both its biggest strength and its biggest weakness the weakness is pretty obvious since it has to be added specifically and explicitly by developers there's the greatest chance that it gets just left to the side because they have other things to do at the same time it gets more tuning and it can be inserted anywhere canonically in the pipeline we'll talk about that more later in this regard fsr is much different than nvidia's original dlss 1.0 which was trained per game so using a ground truth image nvidia could deep learn the intended super sampling effect coming out of the end of it fidelity effects super resolution as you likely know from our coverage over or maybe about a year ago now is a universal post-processing effect as is dlss 2.0 onwards but they are still different in how they execute in some ways that we talked about previously even so amd's press deck contains the following highly technical quality comparison they say rsr is good and fsr is better than rsr it's simple enough and we actually do agree with andy's analysis here but we'll show you why with image comparisons today now confusingly as it was built to us about two years ago now almost the expectation of the original super resolution feature which was disclosed almost off the cuff in a press call seems like it wasn't really meant to be thrown out there but it was kind of a we have a response to dlss 2.0 it's going to be called super resolution it's not ready yet that confusingly was supposed to be different from uh the announced fidelity fx super resolution which ended up coming out first we think radeon super resolution is maybe what that original super resolution promise became we're not 100 sure how amd sort of shuffled the pieces around behind the scenes but anyway it seems to have all launched at this point and obviously with intel coming up with its own xes soon for its gpu launch likelier around that time we'll have a lot of technologies to compare for super sampling for upscaling all that stuff one quick note too here before we really get ramped into this uh fsr 2.0 was also announced and is really interesting and it's also where rsr will become far more interesting than it is today we'll talk about that more in the conclusion though out of all that let's take a step back here and revisit fidelity fx super resolution just briefly first to catch everyone back up and then we'll look at radeon super resolution fsr is a post processing upscaling filter with several predefined settings for example fsr ultra quality renders the game at 10 13 the width and height of native resolution while fsr performance renders at half the width and height of native resolution the lower res source is then upscaled using a filter intended to make the end result look closer to the native screen resolution the obvious goal is to improve performance while doing all of this the idea is that fsr is a lightweight open alternative to nvidia's dlss that doesn't rely on rt cores to operate making it compatible with basically any modern gpu in fact this was amd's power move when it first started talking about fsr for the original launch because it was supporting gtx 10 series cards and in fact it had the 1060 and its own presentation making the 1060 look good at a time when gpu availability was at its worst and options to stretch the lifespan of everything where needed this was at the same time that nvidia was launching cards expected to be a much cheaper mid-range or low end price except at far higher prices than we would typically see so it really made amd look good when they first announced it fsr supports the rx 300 series cards as well supports apus it even supports intel igps some of the stuff's not validated by andy but it should work the whole strength of fsr is its wide hardware compatibility but its weakness is narrow software implementation as with dlss developers have to choose to add it in as an in-game option many of them have but the fact that it requires an extra step where another party has to opt in obviously is a hurdle to wide adoption for every game in contrast rsr is a driver level feature this is the new one enabling rsr requires going to the graphics tab in the amd software menu not an in-game menu that's the biggest change this is somewhat misleading for less informed users because rsr is a gpu scaling option and gpu scaling is handled on a different tab rsr is analogous to the relatively new gpu scaling and sharpening option under the image scaling drop-down and nvidia's control panel which is definitely a much less well-known feature than something like dlss for example or even fsr even though fsr and rsr use the same math at the end of the day there are some differences in the way they operate rsr's most significant downside is that it must happen on a full rendered frame after all other processing and post-processing complete while fsr can be inserted at the developer's discretion this comes down to the usual canonical view of a pipeline of rendering a frame where different things happen at different intervals and because these things happen at different moments in time fsr rsr popping in before post processing or after post processing will affect the end result of the frame as for some other details running performance mode for fsr on a 4k screen the game renders at 1080p and then upscales basically and then all the ui elements and other post-processing effects are layered on top at native 4k using rsr in the same manner requires setting the whole game to 1080p full screen with rsr enabled at the system level that means the rsr filter is applied to the entire screen including ui elements and any other filters time to get into the image comparisons here so for opinions and analysis as to whether fidelity fx super resolution is any good in the first place just check out our original piece from a year ago our focus there was the quality comparison we did a bunch of benchmarks as well and as a reminder because fsr is the backbone of rsr we don't need to redo a lot of that work we only really need to look at the quality comparison here because of the difference in the pipeline where rsr appears only at the end and fsr can go anywhere so it'll change the image quality but the benchmark results uh in general won't be too different at least in percent scaling versus the previous benchmarks we did so no point re-reviewing fsr as a whole since the technology works the same way but we can get looking at some of the new image comparisons all right starting out with an in-game screenshot of far cry 6 there's an immediate and obvious difference between native 4k on the high preset with taa and ultra quality that's the most subtle fsr setting fsr post processing enhances small details like the face and the lion emblem on the billboard at the center right another example of differences between these two would be the wrought iron fencing in the very center of the screen it could either be argued that it looks better this way as small shadows and details are highlighted or that the details are over sharp as there's some artifacting around the spikes and bars the native screenshot has more success with some extremely thin lines like the distant power poles to the left of the el pariso sign while the lower source resolution and smoothing properties of ultra quality fsr mistakenly erases a greater portion of those poles it's not really the point of this piece though to talk about which of these is better one it's subjective and looking at the technology that way but also this is native and fsr compared not the new rsr the performance increases when using fsr or dlss but subjectively some aspects could be argued as improved and some argued as worse how much of either is required to constitute an overall better or worse grade really depends on what the user is looking for it's not us being wishy-washy that's the nature of image quality comparisons for most people the performance should be the primary objective for why you're using one of these obviously as long as it doesn't look terrible to compare fsr and rsr let's first move to the most extreme setting fsr performance the render resolution at this setting is 1080p meaning that the final 4k image is based on a small amount of source information we'll be using 4k and 1080p render resolutions for all of our examples today because it makes for very clear visual differences and easy math but super resolution scaling is not limited to these resolutions you can use it a lot of other ways and running closer ratios would get better results in many situations okay so doing a quick comparison between native 4k and fsr performance allows us to identify problem areas which then allows us to check how rsr handles those same areas for example the thin reinforcements along the horizontal crane arm are clearly visible at 4k but much of their detail is lost with fsr performance leaving them blobby and it the smaller or thinner the detail the more risk that it's lost at a lower resolution and fsr can't reconstruct what wasn't there to begin with switching to rsr and upscaling the full game from 1080p the crane arm appears almost exactly the same as it did with fsr performance as expected there's some subtle darkening highlighting the struts with fsr that isn't present in the rsr shot implying some post fsr sharpening filter this is one of several areas where fsr's earlier placement in the graphics pipeline canonically helps so further the red writing behind the puppeteer graffiti at the right is less legible with rsr especially when zoomed out the faded colors in the graffiti appear more in focus with the in-game fsr option that unfocused look of rsr is clearest in this and other areas of subtle color variation like the blue tarp in the foreground small shadows across its surface imply texture with that bizarre but are softened with rsr making it look smoother when looking at the full screen these tiny variations are barely noticeable but so far we'd agree with amd's own assessment of fsr being quote better than rsr there are some exceptions rsr is better at handling the metal fencing at the center of the frame preserving horizontal bars at the top edge that fsr almost completely erases as well as largely avoiding the artifact and around the silver gate right at the center of the shot different games apply different post-processing effects so we'll need to look at a few more examples to really see how fastr and rsr stacked up prior to those though let's look at the options menu for a clearer example of how rsr affects ui elements this menu looks identical whether running at native 4k fsr ultra quality mode or fsr performance mode fsr doesn't touch the ui so we have zero differences to point out here rsr however is applied all over the full screen including menus and huds rsr has a couple of effects on this menu first small text like the lettering under system at the top of the screen is blurred which could reduce legibility of small text this is one of the main reasons fsr is preferred to rsr to be fair though the lettering is clearer with rsr than it is at 1080p with no filter so rsr is a net positive for games that don't have either fsr or a separate render resolution setting if you own a 4k monitor and you're already forced to run some games at 1080p fullscreen then rsr is an improvement next because rsr requires setting the game to a below native resolution ui elements are sized with that smaller resolution in mind lines around the various menu options are thickened before rsr even gets to them overall it's not nearly as bad as we'd feared user interfaces are typically designed to be sharp and easily readable to start with which gives super resolution scaling a better chance with some basic expectations set we can move straight to a comparison between fsr performance and rsr at the equivalent 1080p source resolution in the rift breaker the most visible change is in the flat grass texture around our mech's feet which is sharper with fsr as with far cry it seems like some post-processing is happening after avasar that sharpens the small dark areas in these textures while rsr is forced to come in at the very end of the chain and blur the same areas outside of that the two effects don't look much different the complex shapes of the tall grass look nearly identical with no clear advantage for fsr in the clarity of individual leaves surprisingly rsr actually has a positive effect on some of the hud elements in this one which are sprites that were rendered at a lower than 4k resolution fsr doesn't touch them as intended but rsr does a good job of tidying them up taking a look at the options menu rsr does have an undesirable softening effect around the edges of lettering especially smaller print like the word language it's a subtle effect but it does make it clear that the game isn't running at the native screen resolution again we're showing a worst case scenario here by upscaling a 1080p source image to a screen with four times the pixels so this should be as bad as it gets finally we have cyberpunk 2077 a game that we've thoroughly picked over for graphics comparison shots this brightly lit scene shows the least difference between rsr and fsr out of the shots we've looked at thus far although the thin lines of cyberpunk's hud elements are affected more notably by rsr than the thick lettering in the other two titles with some detail lost in the car and cell phone sprites at the bottom left as well as obvious blurring on the numbers next to the phone and the grenade icons cyberpunk also has a lot of tiny decorative text like connection database written on our hud to the left of our quest log little details like this make fsr look great in comparison to rsr since fsr presents that small lettering in native 4k contributing to an illusion that the whole game is running at a higher resolution and since this is subjective illusions like that matter in terms of the actual game behind the ui though rsr and fsr look the same here there should be a grid over the street lamp just below our health bar thin lines like these are equally lost with the two filters and fsr isn't any more successful at reconstruction than rsr there is a difference between the two screenshots it's just not significant the degree of difference depends on the individual game implementation of fsr more than anything else the graphics menu in cyberpunk shows the effects on the ui even more obviously with small decorative background text at the bottom left again becoming too blurry to read in some instances nothing vital to gameplay is lost but the thin lettering and sharply detailed ui icons make the upscaling attempt obvious while fsr is harder to notice so the screenshots we've shown for comparison are extreme examples for sake of comparison they are designed and chosen explicitly to try and draw out those differences the reason we do that is because as you get closer you close the gap between the end result resolution or the effective resolution we'll call it and the actual resolution of the base resolution as those draw closer the differences obviously start to sort of disappear you still get some of the performance uplift which is ultimately the key objective of using one of these technologies you don't use them in general unless you need the performance uplift and so as you draw them closer the benefit reduces but also the image quality is more similar between them so we've tried to really make it extreme as to what the differences are and you can see that a lot of times they're still pretty minor the ui differences are some of the most noticeable some games it's worse than others but using rsr though at near native resolutions is much harder to detect just as fsr ultra quality is harder to detect than say fsr performance mode so to be really clear and just give you a hard takeaway here that you can immediately enact in your gaming settings fsr is preferable to rsr between the two if fsr is an option that much is very clear and amd has set as much so that's that's pretty clear choice if you have a fsr and you you need to use one of them to boost your frame rate so you can make it look a little bit better but uh still be able to play the game then use fsr if it's there now rsr is a welcome alternative to just turning down the game's full screen resolution and you have to use it in full screen mode so that's maybe a turn off for people who do multi-modal setups and need to move their mouse out of the game window to do other things but uh it is a good alternative though to just turning the resolution of the game down however it's increasingly common for games to have render resolution sliders as well and those typically don't affect the ui if ever and some users may prefer that to the minor hassle involved when applying rsr as for using rsr let's talk about that amd's review guide states that quote rsr is supported for all of our rx 5000 series discrete gpus and newer other cards may be fsr compatible a reminder gtx 1060 is uh older and the rx 500 series cards are so because fsr is a more uh widely applicable feature it's got better accessibility between gpus that was its entire marketing point that's why it's been such a strong contender in that aspect where dlss in some ways technologically in image quality it can produce a better result but it's more confined to what you can use it on that's why people like fsr rsr goes back closer to the dlss side of things where it's more specific because it's a feature that is built into the amd software package on windows and we'll talk more about linux in a second so there's no way to use it on other brands that means no nvidia support no intel support and obviously no older amd unsupported gpus can run either so this is effectively flipping the fsr problem back around the other way where universal software support is available but narrow hardware support is the problem that can be okay if you're on the newer gpus it does at least mean that you can expect you'll have at least this option in every game so we hope to see amd expand rsr compatibility to the full list of amd gpus that support fsr but we'll see as the comment section has probably pointed out by now rsr has been around on linux for months and it's our understanding that it may work with non-amd gpus that finally matters the increasingly usable valve proton compatibility layer for linux combined with the popularity of the steam deck mean that linux gaming is finally becoming practical for a mainstream audience back to usability for rsr if exclusive full screen applications run below the native resolution of a display they must be upscaled this upscaling can be done by either the gpu or the display itself generally the default setting for both nvidia and amd is to assign upscaling to the display that's one fewer task for the gpu to perform switching to gpu scaling allows manually choosing the upscaling method like the pixel perfect integer scaling options that both amd and nvidia have added recently rsr is just another upscaling option it forces gpu scaling on and it's mutually exclusive with other scaling methods it should be moved to the display tab with the other gpu scaling options except it only activates in certain scenarios rsr can also be set on a per game basis through amd's software for the most part rsr only works with exclusive full screen programs running below native screen resolution because scaling isn't performed on windowed or borderless windowed programs setting a lower than native resolution at the os level forces scaling on everything and it is possible to activate rsr in a borderless windowed program using this method however rsr intentionally never activates on desktop or with programs running in normal border windows even if the os is running below native resolution so some quick recap comments here and then a more structured conclusion fsr is the preferred option if available over rsr to be clear on that if it's not an option rsr seems fun uh it's up to you this is entirely a subjective thing in some games it probably won't look that good depending on the ui scaling that's its biggest weakness we could find was things like text scaling and blurriness of text especially small maybe slightly angled text to apply a certain aesthetic to the ui like in cyberpunk for example where you start losing enough pixel data or enough clarity that it it is maybe a little bit annoying depending on what your your settings are obviously we're scaling in such a way that it's extreme again if you're closer together it'll look a bit better uh for rsr you one option you have is to just forget about it and just run the game at whatever resolution and then turn the in-game resolution slider down that's an option as well you do have to run it in exclusive full screen at least from what we've tested thus far which might be a no-go for some users the feature is only beneficial though overall because it's optional it doesn't hurt anything so if you don't like it then just don't use it fortunately it's not something that's being sold it doesn't feel like it's really baked into the price of the gpus because they already have enough factors baking the price of the gpus so it is it is optional which means uh it only serves to benefit you or you can disable it depending on how you feel about it for our opinions here on the subjective front talking with patrick who wrote this script or the vast majority of it patrick's feeling was he personally wouldn't use it because he doesn't like the blurry screen or ui elements that sometimes are exaggerated with rsr so that was his stance on it overall patrick personally uses fsr on his home gaming system because he can't run some of the games he plays at 4k resolution while still maintaining high graphics quality so he actually is a daily user of fsr which is pretty cool for his perspective on the script and a large part of why he wrote this one and uh his opinion then is he wouldn't use rsr he would rather use the in-game slider if he had to use something just to preserve the text quality now you may not have that opinion that's fine it kind of depends on how you feel about the text overall and what games you're playing i can see the benefit of rsr uh my opinion on this the subjective side again just to give you patrick's and then mine my opinion on it is rsr does not particularly excite me it's not that really it's not a new idea uh the execution is pretty good but it's not impressive it doesn't really shock us and so in that regard it's just not something that i personally pay a lot of attention to that doesn't mean it doesn't have value uh it does it's just i probably wouldn't really use it either so i there are instances where i could see using rsr but typically just because the way i play games it's it's not really something i don't think i would consider it too much unless really as a last ditch but it does seem to execute fairly well overall so technologically it's the backbone of it is fsr it's just applied somewhere else to the pipeline and since the backbone is fsr and we like that overall with the caveats and the things couple things we didn't like in the original script yeah then rsr obviously is also built on a good foundation but that doesn't change the fact that patrick and i generally wouldn't use it so if you want to try it out though it is obviously free if you have the right amd cards already you could try it and then turn it off if you don't like it and that's kind of where this one ends the feature that everyone's excited for got here a year ago and that's fsr so from what we've seen rsr is not visually much worse than fsr it must be enabled globally on a driver level and it does unnecessary processing on ui elements we're happy to leave rsr off and see the list of game developers implementing fsr continue to grow instead if that's an option more critically though andy also revealed that fsr 2.0 will be shipping in quarter two of this year which is extremely soon with image quality improvements over fsr 1.0 expected this is one area where rsr may have a distinct advantage as with the changeover from dlss 1.0 to 2.0 developers will have to individually choose whether to update games to support the new tech while rsr could potentially receive the evisar 2.0 update across the board at a driver level the big update with 2.0 is the use of temporal data fsr 1.0 operates on individual frames as they arrive while 2.0 will make use of information from previous frames like taa and dlss we'll be back for episode 2.0 analysis of course when it's available but that's where it sort of ends we think that rsr actually is most interesting future looking for that fsr 2.0 update so check back for that because we're going to be looking at it and we'll probably revisit dlss and nis as well but that's it for this one thanks for watching as always subscribe for more you can go to store.gamersaccess.net do you have coasters like these or mod mads or patreon.com gamersnexus we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 306,834

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, amd radeon super resolution, amd rsr vs fsr, amd fidelityfx super resolution, amd fsr vs dlss, amd fsr 2.0, amd fidelityfx super resolution vs radeon super resolution, amd rsr vs dlss, nvidia nis

Id: AgFGI8JFo8g

Length: 26min 8sec (1568 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 19 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/iman7-2]

Anyone else mildly annoyed that FSR and RSR keep swapping sides?

[u/NewRedditIsVeryUgly]

The other required comparison is vs NIS, which has better support for older Nvidia GPUs. Both are driver level features which can help with games that don't support DLSS/FSR.

RSR only supports Radeon 5000 and 6000 GPUs while NIS supports all the way back to the GTX 900 series. AMD really needs to find a way to enable it all the way back to RX 400 cards.

[u/bubblesort33]

Seems to say that FSR 2.0 might be implemented on a driver level in the future, but is that actually possible? Does the driver have any temporal data? People on here have been saying for a long time it's not possible. I can see it becoming part of DX13, maybe some day.

I wonder if maybe there is a workaround. AMD has so much L3 cache on their GPUs that I wonder if that could be leveraged in some way for this. Keep extra frames in memory and use that to store extra temporal data or something like that.