AMD Confirms That FidelityFX Super Resolution ‘FSR’, Its NVIDIA DLSS Competitor, Will Launch This Year For RDNA 2 Powered Gaming PCs

In an interview with PCWorld, AMD reaffirmed its plans to launch the FidelityFX Super Resolution feature for RDNA 2 graphics cards within this year to tackle NVIDIA’s DLSS. The information came from the latest Full Nerd Special podcast with AMD’s Scott Herkelman as one of the guests of the show.

AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution ‘FSR’ For RDNA 2 Radeon RX GPUs Competes With NVIDIA’s DLSS For GeForce RTX GPUs This Year

It looks like the rumor mill was a bit optimistic when it said that the FidelityFX Super Resolution feature for AMD Radeon RX GPUs based on the RDNA 2 architecture will release in Spring 2021. Scott Herkelman (CVP & GM at AMD Radeon) confirmed that their NVIDIA DLSS rival is still in the works and will launch this year. Scott also confirmed that the technology will be coming first to gaming PCs with Radeon RX GPUs but will later be extended to other platforms such as gaming consoles that are powered by RDNA 2 architecture too.

NVIDIA got the head start with its AI-based supersampling technology all the way back in 2018 when Turing based GeForce RTX 20 series was introduced. DLSS 1.0 had a pretty rough start & there weren’t plenty of games that used the feature and while users got to see some impressive performance gains, those also came at a loss of image quality which was often too blurry when compared to playing at native resolution with standard AA methods. That changed over time and DLSS 2.0 showed the true form of the feature with the still impressive gains while retaining almost similar image quality as the native resolution. Even as of now, the feature has seen major updates with The Medium and Cyberpunk 2077 being the latest highlight titles and enablement of gaming at 8K on a single graphics card.

The difference that DLSS makes put the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards a league ahead of AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series.

It’s progressing very well internally in our lab, but it’s our commitment to the gaming community that it needs to be open that it needs to work across all things and game developers need to adopt it. Even though it’s progressing well, we still have more work to do and not only internally but with our game developer partners. We want to launch it this year. We believe we can do that this year, but at the same time we a lot more work ahead of us. We need to make sure the image quality is there. We need to make sure it can scale from different resolutions. And at the same time that our game developers are happy with what we are producing.

— Scott Herkelman (AMD)

We also have an official acronym for the AMD FiedilityFX Super Resolution which is FSR in short as confirmed by Scott below:

It’s probably one of the biggest software initiatives we have internally because we know how important it is if you want to turn on ray tracing that you don’t just wanna have that competitive hit or your GPU get hit so hard. The FSR (that will be called the acronym), is something key to us to launch this year, but it’s gonna a little bit more time. We are progressing well, but we still have some work to do.

— Scott Herkelman (AMD)

Scott also mentions that they aren’t purely eyeing machine learning for FSR but in fact, they are going to work with developers and the gaming community to figure out which approach is best. NVIDIA’s DLSS relies solely on AI-assisted machine learning which is powered by their Tensor core GPU architecture while AMD who seems to be more aligned with the Microsoft DirectML approach, could be run off standard hardware and not specialized AI cores.

You don’t need machine learning to do it, you can do this many different ways and we are evaluating many different ways. What matters the most to us is what game developers want to use because if at the end of the day it is just for us, we force people to do it, it is not a good outcome. We would rather say: gaming community, which one of these techniques would you rather see us implement so that this way it can be immediately spread across the industry and hopefully cross-platform.

— Scott Herkelman (AMD)

AMD Says It Will Not Limit Cryptocurrency Mining Rate on Its Radeon RX GPUs

In another interview posted at PCGamer, an AMD representative confirmed that the red team does not plan on limiting the cryptocurrency mining rate for its Radeon RX GPUs as opposed to NVIDIA who tried to limit it through software hacks but subsequently leaked their own dev drivers that re-enabled full mining hash rate for its GeForce RTX 3060 graphics card earlier this week.

“The short answer is no,” Nish Neelalojanan, a product manager at AMD says regarding a potential mining limiter during a Radeon RX 6700 XT pre-briefing call. “We will not be blocking any workload, not just mining for that matter.

“That said, there are a couple of things. First of all, RDNA was designed from the ground up for gaming and RDNA 2 doubles up on this. And what I mean by this is, Infinity Cache and a smaller bus width were carefully chosen to hit a very specific gaming hit rate. However, mining specifically enjoys, or scales with, higher bandwidth and bus width so there are going to be limitations from an architectural level for mining itself.”

“All our optimisation, as always, is going to be gaming first, and we’ve optimised everything for gaming. Clearly gamers are going to reap a ton of benefit from this, and it’s not going to be ideal for mining workload. That all said, in this market, it’s always a fun thing to watch.”

– PCGamer

Unlike NVIDIA, AMD isn’t offering a mining-specific line of GPUs but there are rumors that they could be in the works. For cryptocurrency mining itself, AMD GPUs aren’t that great compared to NVIDIA’s Ampere offerings due to the large reliance on raw bandwidth that the mining algorithms require to deliver higher hash rates. AMD’s top dog, the RX 6900 XT, offers around 60-70 MH/s in Ethereum while NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3090 can crunch out up to 125 MH/s when tuned.

It makes the Ampere cards a more lucrative investment for miners but at the same time, due to the shortage of GPUs and the increased payout existing GPUs have to offer, there’s no stopping them from gouging up even RX 6000 cards.

The post AMD Confirms That FidelityFX Super Resolution ‘FSR’, Its NVIDIA DLSS Competitor, Will Launch This Year For RDNA 2 Powered Gaming PCs by Hassan Mujtaba appeared first on Wccftech.