AMD Radeon Super Resolution (RSR) - preview

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Image quality

How to enable RSR?

Once you installed the latest driver. Go towards settings, to activate RSR, simply flick a switch in the Radeon software driver, it'll be located under the graphics tab. When you launch a game in, you'll then reduce the in-game resolution and let RSR do its thing. RSR will scale the in-game resolution to the native (or near to native) resolution of your system. Your GPU should be subjected to less stress, allowing it to operate at faster frame rates. The lower the in-game resolution, the better. However, depending on your machine, some balancing will likely be required, since dropping the in-game resolution too far for the sake of higher fps can reduce visual fidelity significantly.


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Hardware support

While FSR is supported by recent NVIDIA and AMD GPU lineups, RSR is only supported by AMD's rDNA cards (including Radeon RX 5000 and RX 6000 series GPUs).


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What about RSR and image quality?

The cumbersome question of this technique applied is what the level of image quality will be. AMD has subdivided several quality modes; these modes are Ultra Quality, Quality, Balanced, and a quite horrible Performance mode. Next to that if your target resolution is Ultra HD, you can upscale from Full HD, to WQHD and make a choice as to how much image quality degradation you deem to be acceptable as a tradeoff for higher framerates.


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Really the success of this implementation depends on image quality, or 'how clean' the image scene remains. DLSS has a strong advantage here, as really AMD is applying an upscaling technique that will need to offer sharp image quality without grave spatial or temporal artifacts. In our findings, we can conclude that RSR (and FSR) have a negative effect on image quality. In retrospect, the earlier versions of DLSS had issues as well; however NVIDIA has the advantage of deep 'learning', they can improve and over time.

AMD created something that certainly isn't unique, temporal upscaling and applied sharpening, the combination of the two will often bring some sort of an effect as they're trying to make an apple with an orange ( the one solution has an effect on the other), this can translate into a blur, grain/noise, artifacts, or other forms of quality degradation. 

The image quality results are going to vary per game.

Test environment (system specification)

Our graphics card test system is based on a sixteen-core AMD Ryzen 9 5950X processor on the X570 chipset platform. We use Windows 11 all patched up. Each graphics card runs on the same PC with the same operating system clone.

System Spec

  • Ryzen 9 5950X
  • X570 (ASUS Crosshair VIII HERO)
  • 16GB DDR4 3600 MHz CL14
  • NVMe, M.2. SSD

Graphics drivers

  • Radeon graphics cards we used a beta AMD Radeon Adrenalin 22.3.1 driver (download). 
  • Resize BAR (rBAR) is activated
Our test PC was outfitted with this heavy setup to prevent and remove CPU bottlenecks that could influence high-end graphics card GPU scores. Let's head onwards to the next page where we'll look at some screenshots and then start measuring several monitor resolutions in terms of relative performance versus quality settings.
   

Quality Comparisons

Below are a number of image screenshot comparisons. All games run RSR based on upscaling. Ultra HD is the native resolution, Full HD and QWQHD are upscaled. In our opinion, upscaling from 2560x1440 to ultra HD, really is okay. However, coming from Full HD there's too much quality loss. 

You can use the image comparison sliders below. For Formula 1 you can check the source images here: Full HD RSR, WQHD RSR, and Ultra HD Native


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