AMD’s next-gen frame rate booster leaves the most popular GPU in the world out in the cold

techradar.com:

The most popular graphics card out there (at least going by Steam’s hardware survey stats) falls below the recommended requirements for AMD’s incoming next-gen frame rate boosting feature.

Team Red recently revealed FSR 2.0 (the successor to the original FidelityFX Super Resolution tech), and made it clear that version 2.0 will not be usable (in theory – more on that later) by those with an Nvidia GTX 1060 graphics card (whereas v1.0 was compatible).

The new baseline where support for Nvidia cards begins is the GTX 16 Series (Turing) and GTX 1070 from the previous Pascal generation. On the AMD side, the base GPUs are the RX 6500 XT and RX 590.

This is a recommendation, mind, so not a hard-and-fast rule, but nonetheless the GTX 1060 – and RX 580 for that matter – can’t clear the bar with FSR 2.0 running at 1080p.

Higher resolutions make even greater demands on your graphics hardware, of course. We’re talking an RX 6600 or RX 5600 (or RX Vega) or better, or an RTX 2060 and GTX 1080 (or RTX 3060 for current-gen) when it comes to 1440p.

4K calls for an RX 6700 XT or RX 5700 and above, and an RTX 2070 or RTX 3070 for those with Team Green.

FSR 2.0 is expected to be released at some point in Q2.

First off, why the greater demands here? Well, FSR 2.0 moves to use temporal upscaling, rather than spatial upscaling as seen in FSR 1.0, the difference being that the former uses data drawn from past frames (not just the current frame) to improve overall quality. Unsurprisingly, upping the quality to better compete with Nvidia’s rival DLSS tech is more taxing for the GPU, and there’s no way around that.

Still, these are only recommendations from AMD, and it could be the case that in certain PCs, maybe with faster CPUs or other components