AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) to launch this year (to fight off DLSS)

For PCs that is. If you read yesterday's Radeon RX 6700 reviews you will have noticed our comments on the fact that AMD still does not have a DLSS alternative available, and that's increasingly hard to defend.

Prior to the reviews got released media asked AMD about this, and two weeks ago, AMD did not have any answer other than we're working on it, with no timeline. It seems that pressure has been built, and AMD is now communicating more clearly about the topic. In an interview with PCWorld, AMD’s Scott Herkelman now has made a statement that AMD’s Super Resolution technology would be released this year. And yes, that's a rather wide margin to name. 

It’s progressing very well internally in our lab, but it’s our commitment to the gaming community that it needs to be open that it needs to work across all things and game developers need to adopt it. Even though it’s progressing well, we still have more work to do and not only internally but with our game developer partners. We want to launch it this year. We belive we can do that this year, but at the same time we a lot more work ahead of us. We need to make sure the image quality is there. We need to make sure it can scale from different resolutions. And at the same time that our game developers are happy with what we are producing.

It’s probably one of the biggest software initiatives we have internally because we know how important it is if you want to turn on ray tracing that you don’t just wanna have that competitive hit or your GPU get hit so hard. The FSR (that will be called the acronym), is something key to us to launch this year, but it’s gonna a little bit more time. We are progressing well, but we still have some work to do.

— Scott Herkelman

AMD is to name the technology FidelityFX Super Resolution, aka FSR. Unfortunately, it is still unknown how this tech will work; logic indicates it'll be a port of full MLAA (DirectML) as developed by Microsoft. AMD does not have Tensor cores or an equivalent to them; the methodology still needs to run over the existing CUs, which will require GPU resources, more so than DLSS. However, since there are no details, this might not even become a machine learning algorithm-based solution.  We state this because this is what Mr. Herkelman mentions:

You don’t need machine learning to do it, you can do this many different ways and we are evaluating many different ways. What matters the most to us is what game developers want to use because if at the end of the day it is just for us, we force people to do it, it is not a good outcome. We would rather say: gaming community, which one of these techniques would you rather see us implement so that this way it can be immediately spread across the industry and hopefully cross-platform.

— Scott Herkelman

We can learn here that the primary focus is shifting to PC; as previously, this same man mentioned they'd release it only until all platforms (consoles) are compatible and ready.