AMD drops a possible hint about how AI could be used in its next-gen upscaler package, FSR 4

pcgamer.com:

In a post on GPUOpen, a site for game and graphics developers, AMD may well have let slip that it plans to take a leaf from Nvidia's book of rendering tools by including a ray tracing denoiser system in its next generation of FSR. And just as important, it will use an AI neural network to do it all.

Unless you've been firmly sticking with an old graphics card and consciously ignoring every GPU development in the past six years, you'll know that AMD, Intel, and Nvidia have all been furiously busy implementing techniques to improve ray tracing performance and visual quality.

The latter is greatly affected by the number of rays that are used to calculate the lighting, shadows, reflections, and so on. Unfortunately, even on monstrous graphics cards like AMD's RX 7900 XTX and Nvidia's RTX 4090, ray tracing is extremely demanding so games only use a relatively small number of rays.

That results in a very 'noisy' image—grainy in appearance and often full of white spots—so games have to carry out a process called denoising to clean it up. While the likes of Cyberpunk 2077, Black Myth: Wukong, and Alan Wake 2 employ their own denoiser system, Nvidia has an AI-powered one called Ray Reconstruction (RR).

Ray reconstruction is all about making ray-traced images look much better and more accurate, rather than improving performance, and in Cyberpunk 2077, it's noticeably better than the game's own denoiser.

But the GPUOpen post makes it clear that Nvidia won't be the only GPU vendor offering such a feature in the near future. «We are actively researching neural techniques for Monte Carlo denoising with the goal of moving towards real-time path tracing on RDNA GPUs.»

AMD's RDNA 2, 3, and 3.5 GPUs can all do denoising right now but only those provided by the game in question and the shader cores handle it all. The fact that the research is specifically about using a neural network to do it means that AMD is very much on board with Nvidia in using AI to boost ray tracing results.

Ke