Following the recent news that Microsoft's Xbox Series S and X consoles now support AMD's FidelityFX suite, we assumed that would soon include the newest Super Resolution tool, due to launch on June 22nd for PC graphics cards. Confirmation came swiftly through a Microsoft spokesperson, who shared the following statement with IGN:

　　At Xbox, we’re excited by the potential of AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution technology as another great method for developers to increase framerates and resolution. We will have more to share on this soon.

　　AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution is the long awaited answer to NVIDIA's acclaimed Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), though it does differ in a few significant ways. First of all, it's entirely cross-platform, which is why Microsoft can easily make it compatible with the next-generation Xbox consoles; Sony could do the same with PlayStation 5 if they wanted to. FSR will also be released in an open source capacity at some point.

　　DLSS, on the other hand, is a proprietary technology that is only available when using GeForce RTX hardware on PC. That's because it exploits the Tensor Cores first introduced with NVIDIA's Turing architecture, which are specifically optimized for machine learning tasks such as DLSS. Additionally, whereas FidelityFX Super Resolution is only a spatial upscaling technique, DLSS uses temporal data (like TAA) to accumulate many low resolution frames in what NVIDIA defined as a multi-frame super-resolution approach.

　　With this limitation, many doubt that AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution could match the quality of DLSS. Indeed, the first brief showcase we had doesn't exactly inspire confidence in that regard; still, AMD will likely improve the technique over time just like NVIDIA did with DLSS, and game developers will have another tool at their disposal when crafting PC and Xbox games.

What is AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution?

How does it work?

　　Super Resolution

　　Major framerate boosts combined with high-quality, high-resolution graphics!Four different quality modes proposed: Performance, Balanced, Quality, and Ultra Quality.Cross-platform

　　FSR is not limited to the latest GPU architectures only! It runs on a large variety of GPUs.Wide API support for DirectX®12, Vulkan®, and DirectX®11!Once released, FSR can be ported onto multiple platforms without restriction.Open source

　　In due course, FSR 1.0 will be provided here on GPUOpen under the MIT license.Easy to integrate

　　The same great experience that you expect from AMD FidelityFX, with a low barrier of entry.Full shader source code provided for a smooth and flexible integration.Fixed and arbitrary scaling supported.