AMD could follow in Nvidia’s DLSS footsteps with FSR 3.0 frame rate booster

techradar.com:

AMD could be planning to take a different direction with FSR in the future, and if a clue highlighted on Twitter is anything to go by, Team Red’s intention is to develop the frame rate boosting tech along AI-powered lines – just like Nvidia DLSS.

That theory is based on a hint tweeted by well-known hardware leaker Greymon55, who spotted a new commit in the LLVM repository which is about the introduction of WMMA (Wave Matrix Multi-Accumulate) instructions on GFX11.

AI accelerate! Should work with FSR3.0 and other features. https://t.co/Wh31UxdoaIJune 29, 2022

Okay, that sounds like a load of gobbledygook, so how about a translation? Essentially, GFX11 refers to AMD’s incoming next-gen RDNA 3 GPUs (and Radeon Pro cards), with WMMA instructions being a way to really boost machine learning (AI) operations. Therefore this could point to FSR – perhaps in version 3.0 – making use of such AI chops for better quality upscaling results.

One theory floated off the back of this is that perhaps RDNA 3 graphics cards will offer some kind of built-in hardware functionality along the lines of Nvidia’s tensor cores – dedicated AI processors on RTX graphics cards, which are used as muscle to drive DLSS.

Obviously, we need to be very careful about leaping to big conclusions from a simple commit. And certainly this does not mean that next-gen RDNA 3 graphics cards will necessarily come with specific hardware designed to accelerate AI workloads (like Nvidia’s tensor cores).

There are a few key things to consider here. Let’s not forget that AMD has only just launched FSR 2.0, and with that tech, a lot of fresh moves were made including the transition to temporal upscaling, offering big improvements over spatial upscaling (as used by FSR 1.0). We’ve