AMD has bounced back into the GPU market last year with the announcement of the Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs and since then we are having only one question – When will AMD bring the NVIDIA DLSS alternative to Radeon GPUs?
It seems Scott Herkelman, the CVP & GM at AMD Radeon, did give us a lot of insight about FidelityFX Super Resolution – the marketing name for the DLSS alternative. It is good for you to know that the main reason AMD is taking so long is because they want to develop as a cross platform initiative rather than NVIDIA’s selective marketing.
So, this is the reason why AMD’s super-resolution technology is still in development but it AMD is definitely aiming to launch it by this year itself. Obviously, if AMD has to compete NVIDIA, it has to make a DLSS alternative.
Scott did also confirm they have a lot of work to do, they are also evaluating the actual technology behind the upscaling algorithm as well. Here’s what he said during PCWorld’s Full Nerd Special podcast:
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.
When asked about whether AMD’s tech will be using the help of Machine Learning or not, Scott did clarify that their tech will not solely be based on ML like what NVIDIA’s is, thanks to their Tensor cores. This makes sense because to implement Microsoft DirectML of super-resolution, you do not need ML:
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.
Although AMD plans to launch the FidelityFX Super-Resolution as a cross-platform initiative, the goal as of now is to launch the tech for PCs first. With time, we can get more insight on when it could end up on consoles, which games and GPUs will support it, and how much performance improvement we can expect.
via Videocardz