AMD brings image sharpening technology to Radeon RX 500 and RX 400 cards

AMD is extending support for its Radeon Image Sharpening to some Radeon cards in the RX 500 and RX 400 series. The technique has to sharpen game images and is therefore somewhat comparable to Nvidia’s dlss.

With the arrival of Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 19.9.2, the Radeon RX 590, RX 580, RX 570, RX 480 and RX 470 desktop cards can also use Radeon Image Sharpening or RIS. It is striking that AMD reports that the technology works with the cards in combination with DirectX 12 and Vulkan. With the Radeon RX 5700 cards, which have been supporting Radeon Image Sharpening since June, the technology also works in combination with DirectX 9. It is not known whether AMD is working on DirectX 11 support.

Radeon Image Sharpening is AMD’s post-processing technique to sharpen images with the least possible impact on performance. The technique is mainly intended to reduce the effects of downsampling the resolution. For example, when running games in 1080p on a 4k monitor, for higher frame rates, images will appear blurry. In addition, temporal anti-aliasing has the side effect that images are not displayed as sharp as they could be.

Developers don’t have to adapt their games for RIS. AMD’s implementation uses a contrast adaptive sharpening algorithm that leaves edges of high-contrast displayed objects untouched to reduce the potential for artifacts. Nvidia’s dlss technique, or deep learning super sampling, aims to do the same, but RTX cards from this manufacturer use tensor cores for this. Other differences are that Nvidia’s approach should improve over time with training and developers must adapt their games for dlss support.