AMD FSR 2.0 will improving your gaming experience

As game engines continue to get more complex and resource heavy, extracting the best performance out of them without compromising on visual fidelity can become quite difficult. Even if you invest in a super-decked out graphics card (if at all you can find one), it might still struggle at higher resolutions, and you will have to sadly dial down on some visual settings to get the most frame rates out of it. 

This is where upscaling technology like the AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 or FSR 2.0 and NVIDIA’s DLSS come into play. What these upscalers basically do is they take a lower resolution image and upscale it to your monitor’s native resolution, giving you the advantage of running a game at a lower resolution (hence, better fps), but without necessarily having to compromise on visual quality.

How they achieve that is beyond the scope of this article, but basically it is done through some super complex machine learning that calculates data from the game within milliseconds to output a complete image. 

AMD FSR 2.0

Unlike NVIDIA DLSS which requires dedicated cores on an NVIDIA graphics card, AMD’s FSR 2.0 is GPU-agnostic which means that it can run on any reasonably modern graphics card, be it an AMD, NVIDIA, or hey, even an Intel GPU. 

FSR 2.0 is in many ways a step up from AMD’s previous upscaling attempt, the FSR 1.0. Instead of using a simple post-processing filter that would take a low-resolution image and attempt to make it look clearer by applying a sharpening filter. FSR 2.0 actually uses temporal data as well as depth information to perform the upscaling. 

In layman terms, the new upscaling technology looks at the previous frames and a number of other composition information, applies its own form of anti-aliasing and outputs the image. This is basically what NVIDIA DLSS also does, but the advantage here is that AMD’s technology is open-source and can be implemented by everyone, and be used everywhere.

The only step back for FSR 2.0, in terms of implementation, is that it requires more involvement from game developers to add it into their games. The upscaler requires access to motion vectors and other crucial data that cannot be gleaned from screen space alone. 

At the time of writing, there are only two games that support FSR 2.0 - Deathloop and God of War. AMD is promising support for a lot more games in the future, including Microsoft Flight Simulator, Forspoken, Hitman III, Eve Online, Farming Simulator 22 and more.

For this article we tested Deathloop- running the game at Ultra settings with ray-tracing turned off. At the native 1440p resolution, we used temporal anti-aliasing with sharpening at 5. For FSR 2.0, we used the same settings with sharpening set to 5, as well (the default is 10 but that creates an overall grainy image, and so we do recommend turning it down by a notch).

FSR 2.0 - Input vs Native Resolution

Before we delve deeper into the differences that the FSR 2.0 brings, let’s have a look at the resolutions the upscaler runs at compared to the output resolution (FSR 1.0 also shares the same resolutions).

FSR 2.0 Quality Mode vs Native Mode

AMD has ramped up its upscaling technology with the FSR 2.0, and at a quick glance, it’s hard to tell the difference apart between it, and the native mode. 

This is especially true between FSR 2.0 Quality mode vs Native, where the differences are negligible and one would require a keen eye to notice any major differences. In fact, in some instances, the Quality mode provides for a better overall image quality than the native mode which is surprising and quite impressive. The FSR 2.0 Balanced and Performance mode’s differences are quite apparent in motion, where the blurriness of the lower resolution stands out more.

For this section, we will focus on the differences and improvements FSR 2.0 Quality mode brings compared to running a game in its native resolution. Again, at a first glance, it’s hard to tell them apart but the fps boost you receive with the Quality mode is significant. In most instances in Deathloop, we saw an fps increase of around 20-30fps, which frequently crossed the 100fps mark in many scenarios (especially indoors).

The biggest improvement FSR 2.0 Quality mode brings is a better form of anti-aliasing. In the image below, notice the railings on the building and the yellow circular lights on the left have a much more clear definition and anti-aliasing than the native mode. What’s not apparent in the image is the shimmering effect the temporal anti-aliasing introduces in the native mode, which is completely eliminated in the FSR 2.0 Quality mode, which produces a much neater and stable image.

Here’s another scene where the anti-aliasing on the native mode completely fails to render the railings on the building, whereas FSR 2.0 Quality mode does a much better job in preserving the lines and details.

The anti-aliasing issue with the native mode is more apparent the farther the object is, where it starts to lose details and introduces the annoying shimmering effect. Below is yet another example of this - albeit a far less glaring one - where the FSR 2.0 Quality mode is able to preserve the fine details of the balloon entanglements and the railings on the building without the blurry fuzziness that the native mode brings.

The most impressive aspect about FSR 2.0 is how it works in bringing better texture resolution and detail than the native mode. In the image below, you can see how much sharper and crisp the wall texture looks with FSR 2.0. It’s most noticeable around the left side of the little window, where in the native mode, the block of wall surrounding it is kind of blurry, but with FSR 2.0, it’s sharper, clearer and has better shadow detail.

Another more obvious example of this can be seen in the screenshot below. The grass on the little mound is more defined and has better ambient occlusion, whereas on native, it's one block of blurry texture.

Where the FSR 2.0 stumbles is with motion. The upscaler seems to struggle when interpolating multiple frames in quick motion, where it introduces blockiness and jagged edges to objects. In the image below, the character appears slightly jagged and of lower quality when compared to the native mode, and this gets progressively worse in Balanced and Performance mode.

Now, this is not very evident while playing a game (if at all), but there are some instances where you can see it quite clearly, especially when it comes to objects that have finer details. The video below demonstrates this perfectly, where the security camera’s light appears jagged while everything else in the image has proper anti-aliasing. Surprisingly, FSR 1.0’s Ultra Quality mode fares much better and closer to the native mode in this regard, but you do lose out on better texture resolution and anti-aliasing from the overall picture.

FSR 2.0 - Quality vs Balanced vs Performance Modes:

When it comes to texture resolution and detail preservation in still objects, the FSR 2.0 Quality, Balanced, and Performance modes are on par. There may be very slight degradation in quality but it’s negligible.

However, the lower resolution upscaling is very apparent in motion, where farther away objects appear slightly blurry - especially in Performance mode - but it still remains extremely playable. The fps boost you receive when you dial down the FSR 2.0 modes is significant, as well. Between Quality vs Balanced, you get around 5-10 fps increase, and you see that number climb to an additional 10-20fps when compared to Quality vs Performance modes. In Performance mode, Deathloop sat at a comfortable 100fps+ in most scenarios, and even saw around 130-140fps indoors.

Where the Balanced and Performance modes take a hit is proper anti-aliasing, which suffers from relatively the same issues as the native mode. That said, in most cases Balanced and Performance modes still hold better anti-aliasing over the native mode and eliminates the shimmering effect almost entirely. In the image below, you can see the lower quality of anti-aliasing in Balanced and Performance mode on the building railings, when compared to the Quality mode.

Objects in motion also suffer from the same quality degradation between the modes, with the Performance mode being the worst of the lot with a ton of jagged edges and overall lower quality of texture detail preserved.

FSR 1.0 Quality Mode vs FSR 2.0 Quality Mode

There is no contest here. FSR 2.0 Quality mode is far away a better choice than the same mode on FSR 1.0, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise due to how different the upscaling technologies are. FSR 2.0 has better texture resolution, detail preservation, and anti-aliasing, and gives an equally good performance despite both of the modes running on the same input resolution of 1706x960.

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However, objects in motion still remain an achilles heel for FSR 2.0, where it performs noticeably worse even when compared to FSR 1.0. In the sample below, you can clearly see that FSR 1.0 does a better job of smoothing out the character, but does so at a loss of overall visual quality.

FSR 1.0 Performance Mode vs FSR 2.0 Performance Mode

The Performance mode is an important one to focus on as it yields the biggest fps boost when compared to the other FSR modes and the native resolution. 

FSR 1.0’s Performance mode was honestly unusable as the blurry textures and low resolution images truly took away from giving you an enjoyable gaming experience. FSR 2.0 Performance mode, on the other hand, still suffers from those issues (it is afterall running at 720p), but the new upscaling technology does a much better job at limiting most of those deficiencies and outputs a very presentable and playable gameplay experience.

Deathloop is a fairly well optimized game and churns out good performance even at native resolutions. But for games that truly take the GPU to the task, the Performance mode can help give you those extra frames to achieve smoother gameplay. With FSR 2.0, the Performance mode is now a viable option for games that are hard to run, especially if you have an aging GPU that is barely able to hold its own at the highest settings. 

The fps gains might be worth it alone - Deathloop ran at a consistent 60-90fps in native resolution, while with FSR 2.0 Performance mode, it barely dipped below 90fps, and consistently achieved 110-130fps in many scenarios. 

In the samples below, you can clearly see that FSR 1.0 Performance mode performs significantly worse than FSR 2.0’s. In this scene, you can notice the loss of quality on the crates and the gun, which appear to be mushy and blurry, while FSR 2.0 Performance mode does much better job in preserving those details.

Here again, you can notice the lack of anti-aliasing on the building railings, as well as the almost watercolor-looking textures with FSR 1.0.

The lack of anti-aliasing is most noticeable when there are a lot of finer details on the screen. In the scene below, FSR 1.0 completely loses the plot when it comes to rendering the balloon entanglements, and smothers the textures on the building with the watercolor effect.

Of course, with objects in motion, FSR 2.0 is at a disadvantage, but this is almost forgivable considering how poorly the FSR 1.0 renders the grass and other details surrounding the area.

AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 is a definite step up from its previous upscaling attempts, and surprisingly offers close to, and sometimes, even better than native visual quality with a significant boost in fps. The Performance mode also becomes a viable option where it is able to retain more texture detail than previously possible, producing a very playable gameplay experience without compromising a whole lot on visual fidelity.

The most exciting part about FSR 2.0 technology is that it will not only benefit aging GPUs (regardless of the manufacturer), but AMD has confirmed that it is also part of the Xbox Series S/X SDK development tools, which means that consoles games will also be able to receive the benefits of the upscaling technology very soon. The PS5 and the Nintendo Switch also run on AMD GPUs, and there is a good possibility that those systems might support FSR 2.0 in the future, as well.