AMD FSR 2.0 is a more demanding, higher-quality upscaling upgrade

rockpapershotgun.com:

AMD have revealed more about FSR 2.0, the major overhaul of its FidelityFX Super Resolution upscaling tech, after a detail-light announcement last week. FSR 2.0 will represent a switch from simple spatial upscaling to more closely match the advanced temporal upscaling techniques of its rival, Nvidia DLSS – and while it won’t use DLSS-style machine learning, AMD say the trick to FSR 2.0’s improved performance is down to some good-old-fashioned human brainpower.

I appreciate that’s already a lot of dull techy words, so here’s the basics. Both FSR and DLSS aim to improve frames-per-second in games by rendering them below your monitor’s native resolution, then upscaling them to make up the difference in sharpness. Currently, FSR uses spatial upscaling, meaning it only applies its upscaling algorithm to one frame at a time. Temporal upscalers, like DLSS, can compare multiple frames at once, to reconstruct a more finely-detailed image that both more closely resembles native res and can better handle motion. DLSS specifically uses the machine learning capabilities of GeForce RTX graphics cards to process all that data in (more or less) real time.

FSR 2.0 will use temporal upscaling too, albeit with purely human-designed algorithms to crunch data from multiple frames, rather than machine learning. The result, on paper, is vastly improved image quality compared to the spatial FSR 1.0, without need of dedicated machine learning hardware like that of the RTX series. AMD revealed comparison images for Deathloop, one of the first games that will support FSR 2.0 when it launches, showing the sharpness difference between the old and new upscalers:

In a community blog post, AMD software product marketing specialist Alex