AMD's DLSS Competitor, FidelityFX Super Resolution, Launches This Month

Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) is one of the most important PC gaming tech innovations in recent years, as it greatly increases accessibility to running games at high frame rates and high resolution, even with ray-tracing turned on. The only catch is that, as an Nvidia product, it's been limited to Nvidia GPUs. Now, AMD has announced that its answer to DLSS, called FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), is coming on June 22.

According to AMD, FSR essentially uses high-tech upscaling algorithms to allow for massive performance boosts for games that support it. It's basically fancy dynamic resolution scaling: It intelligently reduces a game's resolution at certain times in order to preserve framerate.

The biggest difference between FSR and DLSS is that AMD's tech is built on GPUOpen, meaning that it'll be free to developers and released in open-source form. It also does not use deep learning tech or hardware--FSR doesn't involve tensor math. What this means in implementation is that FSR will be supported on far more devices than DLSS. It'll work on AMD, Intel, and Nvidia products, and you won't even need a dedicated graphics card to see advantages from it.

Despite it not using deep learning, AMD promises that FSR will provide massive performance boosts to games. The company states that it'll give, on average, two times faster 4K performance than running a game in native 4K. In addition, FSR will have four different modes that change the tradeoff between image quality and performance.

Although the feature technically launches on June 22, it'll take a while for it to be supported by developers. AMD promises that the tech will be implemented by "over ten" studios and engines in 2021. Godfall is one of the first games that will incorporate FSR.