Testing AMD’s FidelityFX FSR in VR! - Guide to Using It!

hey youtube people today we're going to be testing amd's fsr technology but inside vr today and see if it's something that it can prove your frame rate and if it does improve your frame rate at what cost we'll try to answer that question in this video [Music] rendering 3d games is one of the most demanding things your gpu has to do and with higher and higher resolution displays it becomes increasingly difficult for the gpu to keep up it's kind of a magnitude issue the more x and y that you add to a resolution it actually is exponentially growing on the interior of the area of the pixels that need to be rendered in the center of that image this is why software engineers have gotten creative in the way that they utilize the gpu to push image data to those high resolution displays nvidia's push dlss an ai based upscaler that uses machine learning to render a game at a lower resolution which is easier on the gpu and then intelligently upscale that image in a way that makes it least indistinguishable from an image that was rendered at the full resolution in the first place the net effect is that the gpu can push higher frame rates at higher resolutions than it could using traditional methods of rendering every single pixel amd has followed suit recently and has developed a similar technology called fsr while it uses a different approach than dlss the intent is the same render the game at a lower resolution and use creative upscaling to push higher resolutions at quicker frame rates than the gpu could do using traditional pixel per pixel methods so if you thought gaming at 4k was demanding imagine vr setups which not only are pushing more pixels than 4k they are also doing it per eye couple that with the fact that maintaining high frame rates in vr is necessary to avoid making people feel sick from their experience and it sounds like these upscaling technologies and virtual reality might be a match made in heaven nvidia has announced dlss for several vr games including no man's sky and while amd may have future plans to add official support for fsr inside vr games luckily their work is open source and aspiring modders have taken care of this for us already to use in most steam vr games f holger is one such modder and i'll include a link to his github package in the description that's what we'll be using today to take a look and see how it affects our performance in a virtual reality game first let's see how to install this mod in something like fallout 4. all right so let's take a look at how to install this thing you should be able to find the link in the video description but it's uh right here on this github site and once you go there you go to the releases area and download the openvr fsr zip that's in here maybe a different version than this by the time you're watching this video but we're going to go ahead and download that and you're going to take your zip file and you're going to extract it and then you'll see inside here you have two files openvr underscore api.dll and a config file now i'm just going to copy these right now and because you're going to put these in place in your game folder the game i'm going to be working with is fallout 4 so for me i'm going to go to my steam directory and then inside steam this is most likely for most people in c program files x86 and then steam but for me i have my steam library on a secondary drive so we're going to go into steam steamapps and then common and then you're going to go into fallout 4 vr now once in here you're going to find a file right here it is openvr dot underscore api.dll as well you don't want to just straight up copy right over this because then you would lose your existing default file so what you're going to want to do is select that file and rename it to original and now that you've done that you can take your files from the zip you downloaded and paste them into this folder now the second thing i'm going to do is open up this config file and kind of let you take a peek at it with me so inside here we've got some different options for fsr now here's the amd presets 0.77 0.67 0.59 and 0.50 for ultra quality balance and performance and that's the render skill that's basically if you are at say a you know just a for example a 1080p resolution whatever 0.77 of that is is your new reduced rendering resolution and it will upscale it to 1080 when you put it there so i think to start out especially since i'm running a pretty beefy machine i'm just going to use the ultra quality setting and see what type of results i get for now if you're on a weaker computer and i'm going to i'm going to look at this on a much weaker computer i plan on making a video on how to optimize your vr performance on a gpu that's not quite up to snuff and fsr is going to be a part of that um so stay tuned and subscribe for that video coming up but uh the other thing you can do is adjust the sharpness uh the sharpness ranging from point nine or it goes from zero to one but uh 0.9 is a pretty good place to start and somewhere between 0.9 and 1 is maybe where you want to be this radius setting is really interesting the radius setting lets you choose how much of a circle inside of your window you want to actually apply fsr to now what this means is you can basically let the edges of the image be upscaled using bilinear filtering rather than the true fsr which is a little bit less overhead heavy which means if you only want to have the good sharpening and upscaling method done uh you could go as low as you know 0.2 and that might just be a smaller circle right in the center of your vision point and if that's all you care about you could play with this to get a little bit better performance but i'm going to leave it at the default of 0.5 here for now um so those are some of the the little adjustments so if you wanted to go quality you would change this value to 0.67 here if you wanted but i'm going to leave it at 0.77 and take a look and see what that looks like in our fallout 4 testing so i'm going to save that and i'm going to reload up the game and we'll take a look so there's two things i want to look at uh as we go through this and apply fsr to our game uh first thing i want to look at is how much does this affect frame rate uh does it really give us a boost because if there's no boost why reduce your image quality and then b how much does our image quality get affected at different levels so we'll look at it at their high quality and their performance which is you know performances code name for not as good image quality but should have the highest frame rate so first let's look at the frame rates and see if we get a boost by using this technology so along the top you can see native rendering and we have a frame rate counter over there on the left side of each of these screens and at native resolutions without fsr applied it tended to do pretty well but dipped into the 70s and 80s occasionally where fsr you know only running here at 77 of the regular resolution then upscales uh tended to stay above 120 frames a second most of the time so yes there are some performance gains here but also the other thing was there is a little bit of sharpening that happens with fsr which i actually like i applied sharpening mods anyways in steamvr so that's actually good this is built in as well so now if we look at this thing in performance quality uh that you can see this is performance is running at half resolution so if it was 1080 divide that half it's 540. um so obviously your performance should be much better here and it is i it was basically locked at 144 frames per second so definite performance improvement but how did that affects image the image quality we're going to look at that next so in order to show the image quality differences it's necessary to do this through the lens uh because the you you probably saw the rendering window on the desktop actually shrunk every time we applied more and more fsr it got smaller and smaller which means you actually have to see it through the lens to see what the differences are and what the image quality looks like i'm going to show those on the display and comment on them as we look at them together okay so these are the through through the lens videos comparing native and fsr ultra quality and uh fsr ultra quality looks pretty good you can see a little bit of shimmering around the edges just slightly however i don't know if you would notice at all really i mean i mean a blind taste test uh to coin and phrase i don't know if you'd actually be able to notice uh easily uh looking at the performance quality there is you can see quite a bit of artifacting especially around the edges of things like that lamp post right there but the texture qualities when when you're looking right at it look pretty good it does a good job of upscaling you can see the rocket seems to have a lot of the detail preserved or at least apparently preserved with their upscaling method so uh frame rate is super smooth in there though so it's it's good to have the option to have it smooth but you can definitely see some issues with that performance method of upscaling so i've had a chance to play with fsr technology in vr using this community mod for several days and i have a few takeaways that i want to leave you guys with as we've looked at this first thing is open source is awesome it's awesome the amd released this open source so modders could immediately take it and tinker with it and make it available to everyone [Music] the the fact that we have uh modders who who can turn this around that quickly and get us out and available to play with is just awesome the first my my first impression is so my second takeaway is the fsr ultra resolution setting was almost indistinguishable from native rendering so to me that's like it's almost a no-brainer to apply this if you are having trouble with uh maintaining certain frame rates um but that brings me to my third takeaway which is if you and i hate to be like i'm the pc master race guy but i've got a 3090 rtx 3090 and uh amd 5950x in my machine and with a valve index that you know is doesn't have the best resolution out of all the headsets out there uh it i can pretty much run anything even at 144. um so i was going through game after game after game trying to find something that was dropping frames that i could actually use this thing to get a benefit from and there was almost nothing out there so if you if you've got a high-end pc and you're not experiencing like noticeable performance problems this may not interest you but the second you update your headset to something like uh you know the vibe pro 2 or um the vargo which has an incredibly high resolution or the reverb g2 story may have been a little bit different there uh so uh that's my takeaway if you're already running high-end gear you don't have performance problems why mess around with this but for the the majority of people who are running you know a low to mid-end gpu this is great technology um you will be able to get better frame rates um without really affecting your image quality if i put it this way if you were running your headset at you know 1600 by 1600 per eye and it was dropping frames in order to get a smooth 120 frames per second or something you had to reduce it to maybe 800 by 800 pry and that's the way you were able to hit your target frame rate that would look pretty bad um but if you use the performance mode fsr it's still going to look bad but not as bad as if you just reduce the pixels the upscaler it's it's kind of having your cake and eating it too because you do get you you get the benefits of dropping your resolution uh without it having it look as dirty and pixelated so it's it's actually really good technology for that and if you noticed in even even on my high-end pc um i could see a case for like if you're someone who who you're playing fallout and there's just certain sections of the game that just drop out on you and you are really sensitive to dropped frames and in you know if it's running at 60 frames a second or lower all of a sudden in just certain areas and you're just like this sucks um have fsr turned on and you don't drop nearly as low you never hit those spiky laggy areas anymore because you're using this technology that's a great use case you can maintain your motion resolution more than your visual fidelity resolution so um there's kind of this sweet spot of technology sweet spot of like of where this technology is useful because we have like just a bare bones like i mean it's not gonna do miracles you're not gonna be able to take your like intel uh hd graphics and suddenly be able to run vr on them you know and have any sort of good quality uh but if you're one of those kind of mid-range people you've got maybe like a 1070 or you know a 2060 and you're running a a headset that's you know or or even a quest has fairly high risk quest 2 has very high resolution even compared to the the valve index um so you could apply this and basically hit the your the um the frame rate and the resolution that you're trying to hit um so it's it's pretty cool like i think the people benefit this most are those with those lower to mid range uh gpus or you have just a headset with a huge amount of resolution maybe your pi pimax 8k user with two 4k displays to to push pixels through uh i think that's going to be very important in the future going forward so i think i think this is pretty neat technology and you can definitely benefit from it and it's free so go check it out hopefully this video was useful to you to be able to know how to do it um and give you the right expectation of of how it's going to affect your experience as you use your vr headset and play with fsr so thanks for watching please subscribe we'll have a video coming up soon on how to use a low end gpu and get as much performance as possible out of it for vr so thanks for watching see you later

Channel: cbutters Tech

Views: 42,013

Keywords: FidelityFX, FSR, VR, fholger, sharpening, Steamvr, performance, benchmarks

Id: j92pOSuRQ4o

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 31 2021