AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution launched yesterday, supported by seven games with others coming in the future. Some of the developers have decided to speak to AMD’s official YouTube channel about their experience with FSR, and all of them have stressed the extremely easy and quick implementation process. We’ve gathered their thoughts and considerations below.
Takeshi Aramaki, Studio Head and General Manager at Luminous Studio Productions (working on the action RPG Forspoken, due next year on PC and PS5):
Our studio’s vision is to create games unlike anything experienced before, fusing the world’s latest technologies with art.
Implementing cutting-edge AMD technology in the development of Forspoken is an embodiment of that philosophy. With Forspoken, we are aiming to achieve the highest quality visuals ever seen in an open world game.
High frame rates at 4K is important for providing the best possible experience when playing Forspoken, but very precise optimization is required to achieve this. AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution provides a significant performance boost when running Forspoken at 4K and 60FPS. FSR is an ideal upscaling solution to its compatibility with various platforms and its extremely fast processing speeds.
For the development of Forspoken, we are really feeling the benefits of the low latency of FSR, and the high performance that it brings. FSR implementation only took one day. The process was very simple and fit in our pipeline very well.
From an image quality standpoint, the difference between the highest quality settings and native resolution rendering is undetectable. FSR integration was very easy and there were no problems, even when using Dynamic Resolution.
I believe AMD’s GPUOpen philosophy is raising the entire gaming industry’s technical standards, which in turn benefits all players. We can’t wait for players to get their hands on Forspoken and experience the next-gen graphics that were made possible by FSR.
Mateusz Makowiec, CTO at Teyon (working on Terminator: Resistance):
We’re very happy we joined forces with AMD on Terminator: Resistance. We believe that AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution can help us to expand the audience and improve the game’s visuals for many players. It’s also important for us that the technology is compatible with both AMD’s and other vendors’ graphics cards.
Terminator: Resistance is based on a custom version of Unreal Engine 4, so we were a bit worried that it might complicate integration. Luckily FSR is open source, so we were able to merge it with our internal engine changes. It took maybe a day to integrate it with the engine and then some time to add the option to the UI. We didn’t need to make any tweaks, it just worked.
Michal Tatka, CEO at Teyon:
We believe open standards and open platforms drive innovations further. When telling a great story inside a game, graphics is important. We want to take our games to the next level and cutting edge technologies like FidelityFX Super Resolution can help us to get there faster.
Pawel Lekki, COO at Exor Studios (working on The Riftbreaker):
AMD shares some of the same philosophies as Exor. We both want to deliver the best possible visual quality to as many gamers as possible. AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution allows us to achieve this goal regardless of the hardware that our players choose to play their game on.
If you enable all of the technologies in The Riftbreaker like ray tracing, temporal antia-liasing, and full particle quality, that of course takes a toll on your GPU. FidelityFX Super Resolution is the perfect technology to use here because players can enable all of these effects, see the game in its full glory and at the same time get really great performance. FidelityFX Super Resolution is great because it’s super easy to implement. The initial implementation took us two days and as soon as we got implemented we started tweaking the game, the engine, to make it look as good as possible. That additional tweaking time was about an additional week, so in total I think the implementation time was just a bit over a week. This is really not a lot in terms of game development time schedules. Regardless of the platform, we can deliver the same technology, we don’t have to customize it per vendor, it just works. The reason why FSR was such a great solution for The Riftbreaker is the fact that it’s a shader that works on top of our rendering pipeline. It doesn’t require any low-level hooks in the engine and doesn’t change the way we render the game.
Chris Kingsley, Founder, CTO, and Co-Owner of Rebellion (which implemented FSR in Evil Genius 2):
At Rebellion we’ve been working for many years with AMD. We’re really excited with our partnership, it allows us to really improve the quality of our games, visuals and frame rate, and that means we can get the best results for our players. At Rebellion we’re very keen to push the boundaries of technology in our games, so for Evil Genius 2 we’re using FidelityFX Super Resolution to get faster frame rate on all ranges of PCs that we’re getting our game on, from the base level, entry level, laptop for example, all the way up to the highest level of graphics card.
FSR is a powerful but straightforward technique which we can easily drop into our games. It uses compute shaders to get better quality. It doesn’t require too much effort in, it’s well optimized across a broad range of platforms. FSR complements the other technologies that we’re using in our games. It works really well, it slots in beautifully with all the other technologies and really helps us improve the visual quality and frame rate in Evil Genius 2 for example.
Implementing FSR in our games was very easy, it was pretty much drop-in and it was only a few days. It was remarkably easy, I think it would be fair to say.
At Rebellion we have a philosophy of getting the best we can for our games. It’s important for us that we use, where it makes sense, sensible open source technologies because we can broadly apply them across lots of different platforms and we can have a look at the source code, which is important. AMD’s FSR really helps us get higher resolution for all our games and higher frame rates, it’s a win-win for everyone.
Teemu Jyrkinen, CEO and Creative Director at Vaki Games (working on the third-person MOBA Kingshunt, now in an open playtest phase on Steam):
We’re super excited to collaborate with AMD. We are super impressed about AMD’s latest tech and what we can do with it. With Kingshunt, AMD has helped us to push the game to a much larger audience with AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution.
We have always wanted to push the limits of visual fidelity and fluent combat. We want as many gamers as possible to enjoy Kingshunt without losing frame rate or visual fidelity. Not all the gamers have powerful computers at home and we wanted to bring Kingshunt to all the players out there. You can enjoy the highest quality settings without sacrificing frame rate, because frame rate matters. As a small game studio, we want to use technologies which are easy to implement and easy to use. With AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, the implementation was easy and we could see the benefits right away from the first playtest.
FSR is best-in-class spatial upscaling solution. We believe in open standards like GPUOpen, it gives us small studios like us and others out there great library, great toolsets, great documentation to support development.
Emil Anticevic, CTO and Executive Producer at Counterplay Games (working on Godfall):
AMD’s philosophy is very similar to ours. We want to push the limits of visual fidelity and immersion and we want to have as many players as possible experience the beauty of Godfall. AMD has helped our team make this possible for a much larger audience with AMD FidelityFX SR.
As a smaller development team, we face a big challenge when bringing next-gen technologies to our players. We want our players to experience these features but without limiting them to only high-end hardware. We want the vast majority of our players to experience next-gen visual fidelity and upscaling technologies like FSR help us achieve that. It was important to us that their upscaling technology is an open solution, because this allows us not only to easily implement this in Godfall but also to customize it to achieve even better results. Not only is FSR easy to implement and to see a substantial performance boost, but it does so regardless of what brand of hardware you’re running on.
FSR is the perfect complement to the other effects in the AMD FidelityFX toolbox. For example the FidelityFX HDR Mapper, also known as LPM or Luminance Preserving Map. Using it helped us deliver better HDR at a higher frame rate when we paired it with FSR. FidelityFX Super Resolution is the ideal technology for us.
Granted, these are all game developers who’ve chosen to partner with AMD on FidelityFX Super Resolution rather than with NVIDIA on Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS).
Soon, though, we’ll finally have our first direct comparisons when FSR is implemented in Edge of Eternity and Necromunda: Hired Gun, since both of these titles already support DLSS. Until then, stay tuned.
