AMD explains more about FSR 2.0 and brings it to Xbox and Nvidia GPUs

AMD has announced more about the operation of FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 and says that the technology is coming to Xbox consoles and will also be available for some Nvidia GPUs. FSR 2.0 is a temporal upscaling technique that can play games at a higher resolution.

As AMD announced in mid-March, FSR 2.0 uses temporal upscaling, like Nvidia’s DLSS, instead of the spatial upscaling of the first FSR version. This means according to AMD that FSR 2.0 appears earlier in the frame pipeline and replaces temporal anti-aliasing. FSR 2.0 uses the depth, motion vector and color buffers to upscale the image.

Nvidia GPUs use separate cores for the machine learning computation tasks, but AMD’s GPUs do not have those separate cores. FSR 2.0 therefore uses an AMD-made algorithm that can recognize shapes and objects in an image, see connections with data from previous frames and thus upscale the image to a higher resolution.

AMD claims that such a handmade algorithm has advantages over a machine learning algorithm, such as that the handmade algorithm can be optimized better. It also allows more gamers to take advantage of it, as it doesn’t require specialized machine learning hardware, the company says.

FSR 2.0 will no longer get an Ultra Quality mode, but only a Quality mode as the setting with the highest quality. The scale factor is 1.5 and the image quality is ‘native or better than native’, according to AMD. On the other hand, there’s Performance, which has a scaling factor of 2 and is mainly intended for higher frame rates. In between is the Balanced setting, with a scaling factor of 1.7.

In addition, there is the optional Ultra Performance setting, where developers can choose whether to use it or not. It has a scale factor of 3 and offers the highest frame rate and an image quality that is ‘representative’ of the native resolution.

While FSR 2.0 can boost game frame rates, AMD says it can deliver performance overheads of up to 1.5ms within games. This depends on the specs of a PC and the game, but FSR 2.0 will demand more from graphics cards than FSR 1.0. In the two tables below, AMD gives an indication of the expected delays with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, but also indicates that these are preliminary predictions based on the beta. Left is in Quality mode, right in Performance mode. Both modes include auto exposure and no sharpening.

Developers have to manually add support for FSR 2.0 to their games, just like with DLSS and FSR 1.0. According to AMD, the integration time for this differs per scenario. Games that already support DLSS 2 should take “less than three days” to add FSR 2.0 support. Integration into Unreal Engine 4 and 5 games should also be relatively fast via an FSR 2.0 plug-in. For games that don’t support decoupled game and render resolutions or motion vectors, integration would take four weeks or more, AMD expects.

AMD will make FSR 2.0 available via GitHub as an API and as C++ and HLSL source codes. The company comes with DirectX 12 and Vulkan samples and an Unreal Engine 4.26 plugin. Developers may also implement FSR 2.0 in Xbox games in the future, but AMD can’t say when this will be yet. PC gamers can also use FSR 2.0 on GeForce GPUs from the GTX 1070 and on Radeon GPUs from the RX 590. FSR 2.0 will be available to PC gamers in the coming quarter.

The implementation time of FSR 2.0