Has AMD Fixed FSR 3 Frame Generation?

[Music] welcome back to hardwon box today I'm taking a brief look at amd's FSR 3 technology in the latest game from Ubisoft and massive entertainment Avatar frontiers of Pandora this is a visually stunning title set in the world of the Avatar film series but it's not just a graphical Extravaganza that pushes your PC to the limits it also introduces some much needed improvements for FSR 3 frame generation you see back when I first looked at FSI 3 in its launch State integrated into for spoken and a models of avium there were quite a few issues with the technology when frame generation was enabled frame pacing was broken there were various incompatibilities and issues with feyn and the technology did not play nicely at all with variable refresh rate monitors in effect FSR 3 was broken with VRI displays and often led to a stuttery unpleasant experience there were also concerns around the quality of the upscaling component largely unchanged from FSR 2.2 as well as latency relative to nvidia's dss3 frame generation why AMD would launch FSR 3 in a broken or poor state in two games to begin with is beyond me I guess that's typical AMD marketing stuff but the good news is that they didn't just stand still they didn't simply accept the quality of that initial release and not put in any more work they've clearly been putting in some time to improve the technology just a few months after release which shows in ad frontiers of Pandora the major Improvement made in this game relates to frame pacing FSR 3 now works correctly pacing frames as it should to your display preserving compatibility with variable refresh rates in for spoken and a modals of avum I showed that the actual delivery of frames to the display was paced poorly causing jutter and stutter relative to the game running at the same frame rate without FSR 3 frame generation in Avatar this is a totally different experience frame generation is paced nicely variable refresh rates work as intended and there's no visual difference to pacing between frame gen on or off when viewed using slow motion footage this confirms that for example 80fps produced by frame generation delivers the same sort of smoothness as native 80fps on a variable refresh monitor which is how the technology should work how it should have worked from the start and of course how DS S3 frame generation works as well this means that when actually playing the game FSR 3 frame generation does deliver a notable Improvement to smoothness and actually plays quite nicely the refresh rate readout built into many monitors confirms this the refresh rate is varying in line with the changes to frame rate in FSR 3's launch titles this refresh counter was frequently fluctuating between the max refresh of the Monitor and a lower refresh indicative of poor pacing not an issue anymore these improvements to frame pacing have also carried across two VN configurations on a very variable refresh rate display both vsync on and vsync off work just fine and deliver properly paste smooth frame rate outputs however there is a little bit of a hack here as vsync off with frame generation on in this configuration is actually not vsync off it simply seems to be forcing vsync on as the frame rate never exceeded my monitor's Max refresh rate vsync off works as intended with frame generation disabled at first this may sound a little disappointing for those that really wanted to push FSR 3 frame generation to frame rates higher than your monitor can support but when you think about it for a bit there's really no point in doing so normally the reason you'd run a frame rate higher than your monitor's refresh is to harness lower input latency but generated frames do not improve latency also your monitor can't show these frames properly so you won't see any added smoothness the whole benefit of frame generation and you'd get ugly teing artifacts in return if you don't have a variable refresh rate display or for some reason want to game it a fix refresh rate FSR 3 also works nicely in Avatar with decent frame pacing using vsync on I noticed some small differences in pacing between a similar frame rate with and without frame generation but typically in either configuration you'll see some jutter due to the way vsync works when there is a mismatch between frame rate and refresh rate however for those running at a fixed refresh rate when using vsync off it still seems that vsnc on is used in some circumstances Behavior there is a little weird so for now I would still recommend using feyn on vsync off would be optimal for the lowest latency at a fixed refresh with the compromis of screen tearing but the overall experience is less optimal than using adaptive sync variable refresh which is a now fully working FSR 3 configuration that I would recommend for anyone with an even remotely recent gaming monitor still want to see vsync off working fully at some point but it's less important now that VRI is supported properly given that's how most people will and should be playing the testing you've seen so far was performed and captured on an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 but the same experience is also seen on radon gpus no real differences between the two brands with FSR 3 frame pacing in this game as Avatar frontiers of Pandora does not support DS S3 frame generation we can't see whether there's been any Improvement in latency between FSR 3 and DS S3 frame generation implementations however I do think it's worth taking a quick look at overall FSR 3 image quality to see how this game fares Avatar is quite a visually impressive game with a dense presentation lots of visual detail and heaps of foliage in the open world FSR in general has struggled at times with high detail environments and foliage though I was pleased to see in my limited testing at 4K that image stability is pretty decent using FSR at the Quality or Ultra quality modes not perfect but it does seem like a lot of work has been put in to ensure this implementation of FSR is properly harnessing motion vectors and temporal data it's no Hogwarts Legacy for example again Game Notorious for foliage shimmering in motion with FSR when isolating the generated frame component of FSR 3 so ignoring upscaling quality for now I think Avatar is a great Showcase of the technology I describe the game as moderately paced not a slow walking game like Allen Way 2 but not a fast-paced shooter so generally frame generation has to interpolate between a small to moderate amount of motion between frames depending on your frame rate input method what you're doing in the game and so on I was surprised how much of the foliage and texture detail is maintained even when panning around relatively quickly yes the generated frames are a little blurrier and some areas do suffer from garbling but on the whole the placement of these frames in between the real frames doesn't harm the beautiful detailed world all that much especially when the final output frame rate is over 120 FPS I was expecting really tricky dense fine detail areas like grass to just totally go to crap with frame generation and while yeah generate ated grass doesn't look quite as good I think it holds up in motion the most noticeable issues with frame gen are the usual things I found in our previous analysis so when there is significant motion or when something quickly appears or changes Direction on screen for example if you look at your character's hands or legs in motion with frame gen on you'll see a bit of garbling and that garbling gets worse at lower frame rates similarly you'll see some artifacts around the particles bugs and animals roaming around the world if you look closely and there is a decent amount of motion at the time the most obvious visual artifact though relates to the UI FSR 3 has built-in systems to prevent UI garbling a major issue with dealers S3 in some games however the solution to prevent UI issues in FSR frame generation is to simply not generate a frame in the area around the UI element in effect the UI elements are run at half rate the native frame rate of the game most of the time this is fine especially in menus where the entire screen can simply be run at a lower frame rate but in avatar The in-game UI uses several larger elements and even gradient or blur effects at times obscuring the background so the text is easier to read where the issue comes in is that FSR 3 at least the implementation in this game turns off generation around the entire element not just localized to the text this creates a noticeable half rate rendering effect in the part of the game World immediately behind and around the UI elements such as the health bar at the bottom of the screen I found this quite distracting at times especially once I noticed it so I don't think this way of preserving UI detail is the ultimate solution or best counter for UI garbling yeah garbling sucks it's obvious makes the UI hard to pass but this half rate rendering artifact is also pretty noticeable and especially for larger UI elements it just doesn't look very good neither DSS nor FSR have found the perfect way to handle UI in frame generation at least based on the very latest examples whether or not you find this UI half rate rendering distracting will probably dictate whether you use FSR 3 frame generation or not I'm going to play a lot more of the game later on to see how annoying I find it when I'm mostly just focusing on the game because other than this the quality appears pretty reasonable I'm sure I'll give my full thoughts on that in the upcoming Hardware unbox podcast episodes now while FSR upscaling in this title is generally pretty respectable at 4K using the quality settings probably one of the best examples I've seen so far it's still inferior to dlss using quality settings for some areas of reconstruction the game uses dlss 3.5.1 which is the very latest version and based on a brief assessment dlss had a bit better stability and a bit less flickering and sizzling I don't think FSR 3 is unusably bad in this title at 4K it holds up well but dlss is that bit better in the most challenging scenarios similar situation with the performance mode although artifacts are a little more visible on the FSR side versus DSS something we've commented on previously again I was pleasantly surprised with the performance mode at 4K in this game given the amount of detail and foliage I've seen some truly horrendous examples of FSR attempting to upscale from a low native resolution but here it's somewhat okay though still not a recommended configuration with that said I haven't progressed very far into the game so this is a preview type look at the quality of FSR 3 the primary focus of this video was really to explore the variable refresh rate compatibility updates that I noticed with this latest implementation as this bodess well for future titles and really fixes one of my major issues with the technology to be honest AMD would have been better off waiting until the release of Avatar frontiers of Pandora to debut their FSR 3 technology I've been much more impressed with what I've seen and experienced so far in this game relative to fors spoken and models of avum given that this is also a dense detailed beautiful game world it would have shown that FSR 3 frame generation can handle these types of stressful scenarios and come out in a largely positive light aside from some UR related annoyances but AMD didn't do that so now they have to work hard to change initial perceptions of the technology actually making FSR 3 better is one huge step in the right direction and I hope they continue to put in work to make this Tech the best that it can be I'll be keeping a close eye on other titles that use FSR 3 to see just how many make use of the latest enhancements and hopefully in the future we'll get a showcase game with both the latest FSR 3 and latest dss3 frame generation for a full comparison for now though that's it for this video if you did enjoy this brief preview look sort of at Avatar frontiers of Pandora's FSR 3 implementation then I don't know like the video subscribe to the channel consider supporting us on patreon or float plan links are in the description below you get access to some cool benefits like our Discord Community monthly live streams all sorts of good stuff there so thanks for watching I'll catch you in the next [Music] one [Music]

Channel: Hardware Unboxed

Views: 180,937

Keywords: hardware unboxed

Id: 6McS5GdDozE

Length: 12min 10sec (730 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 07 2023