AMD FSR: Xbox Series S secret sauce?

You’re right about that.

When it comes to machine learning I think we all have to make a distinction between offline and real time machine learning implementations.

You have machine learning used to analyze games “offline” to create profiles where inferring can be done in real time.

I think AMD was clear that they didn’t use any offline AI to build profiles. It truly sounds like this is a generic algorithm that upscales.

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So basically exsiting solutions are better then FSR

Yeah the TAA unreal engine upsampling seems to have better results, however the 4k ultra quality preset seems to work just fine and I feel is the only viable FSR setting that could work on the xbox really well especially for non unreal engine games, but im sure there are many other upscaling techs in the other engines as well

I hope Xbox can couple it with ML or present their onw ML solution soon.

The whole point of FSR is that it doesn’t use ML at all. So it seems to me at least.

But I hope too that MS is coming up with another method nearer/similar to DLSS 2 just for their AMD based GPU. The question remains, are the ML enhancements of int8 & int4 enough to make up for the missing Tensor cores of a RTX GPU? Only time will tell.

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Additional commentary from Alex@DigitalFoundry via Reddit:

Alex here from Digital Foundry -

reading other reviews I think there is a general misapprehension happening about AMD’s FSR in the tech press, so my review reads or watches rather differently. FSR is an image upscaling technique , like a bilinear or bicubic upscale you can do in photoshop. AMD’s own tech briefing and information describes FSR as an uspcaling technique to be compared with simple image space upscalers like Bilinear or Lanczos or Bicubic. It is better than those simple upscalers for the purpose of a video game image.

AMD’s FSR is not an image reconstruction technique like checkerboard rendering, DLSS 1.0, DLSS 2.0, Temporal Anti-Aliasing Upscaling, or a variety of techniques which look to reconstruct the image’s higher level detail beyond the spatial realm while Anti-Aliasing that new image information.

FSR is similarly not Anti-Aliasing - FSR comes after a game has already been anti-aliased and inherits the qualities, faults, and benefits of the anti-aliasing technique of the game in question.

The questions of FSR’s usefulness is important within the context of what a game offers in its settings menu. If for some reason a game literally only offers basic image upscaling with a slider that uses bilinear filtering, or none of that and just has resolution options, then FSR will produce a more pleasing image than those options. But it is not and should not be thought of as an alternative to real image reconstruction techniques.

I say this for the academic purpose of properly classifying things, but also because practically, All people who game on PC should hope that devs implement something like Temporal Anti-Aliasing Upscaling in their game and not only offer something like FSR. TAA U is doing something completely different that has transformative image quality effects and should be desired.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/o5r6sn/digital_foundry_amd_fidelityfx_super_resolution/h2o9afl/?utm_term=37166976273&context=3&utm_medium=comment_embed&utm_source=embed&utm_name=null

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I thought the digital foundry video was good and I think that FSR is quite impressive at normal viewing (not 400% zoomed in) especially when considering the fps increase. Having the option to decide myself in every game would honestly be a good thing IMO. Let me decide in a game if I want 30, 60 or 120fps depending on the upscaling used and I’ll decide if the image quality trade off is worth it.

My uninformed guess is that devs would probably appreciate not having to put this kind of option in every one of their games. That said, I don’t know how much professional pride and authorial intent factor into this kind of thing.

If it’s easy to implement, they should still obviously optimize of course, but if FSR is what could bring the game up to 60 or up to 120 I say why not? Under video settings just give the option with a mention that graphical quality will be degraded slightly in exchange for the high refresh rate. The more 120hz support imo the better, and looking at games like Dirt 5 for example I would have much preferred graphics similar to the 4K option but upscaled with FSR for a slight blur on my picture instead of the sub par presentation the game has in its current 120hz implementation.

Considering there’s already one game on Series consoles implementing it now I’m hoping it’s simple enough for devs or that MS figures some kind of easy implementation on their development kit.

FSR 1.0 now published on GitHub

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Nice. With this being open source, I’m most interested in seeing how it evolves beyond what AMD offers by default. Reminds me of Nvidia’s FXAA two generations ago where the default console settings were lacking in ways but some studios optimized the technique to produce some great results. Even though it’s sub-HD, Halo CE remaster on the 360 was a really clean game and they went through great lengths to optimize FXAA for that title.

so it seems this is a fast approximation of a lanczos filter plus some sharpening. i remain unimpressed.

edit:

“FSR not enabled.” :rofl:

Just because you thought (and claimed) it would use some sort of machine learning? Still a cheap method to upscale your frame with better results than usual. Look into the docs folder in the Github release, there is some more detailed information how to use it and average cost (in ms).

Still I do hope (assuming you do to) that MS is enhancing this with some sort of ML to increase the quality and effect of the upscaling ala DLSS 2.0.

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because it does nothing special :woman_shrugging: And i read the doc before i posted.

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I am sure devs will test out where they can use it or make it completely optional to the user to turn it on or off.

For example, is it better (with less cost) to use FSR instead of VRS_T_2?

Or how it looks if you combine both methods.

Every single percent can help a game to keep at its target framerate.

Though I am one of the lucky guys with a TV that supports VRR so that is not very important for my scenario.

But there are plenty of gamers that do not have that luxury.

And I am pretty sure they welcome a chance to up their frame rate a little bit even it will cost some of pixel clarity. I am thinking about fast paced games where framerate tops out image quality (not the games I play LOL).

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Apparently you can download a demo and try it out yourself:

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