Intel Graphics today posted a technological deep-dive video presentation into how XeSS (Xe Super Sampling), the company's rival to NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR, works. XeSS is a gaming performance enhancement technology where your game is rendered by the GPU at a lower resolution than what your display is capable of; while a high-quality upscaling algorithm scales it up to your native resolution while minimizing quality losses associated with classical upscaling methods.

The video details mostly what we gathered from our older articles on how XeSS works. A game's raster and lighting is rendered at a lower-resolution, frame-data along with motion vectors are fed to the XeSS upscaling algorithm, and is then passed on to the renderer's post-processing and the native-resolution HUD is applied. The XeSS upscaler takes not just motion vector and the all important frame inputs, but also temporal data from processed (upscaled) frames, so a pre-trained AI could better reconstruct details.

The pirate sea-battle online multiplayer, "Skull and Bones" by Ubisoft, is on its way to become the first PC game to feature performance enhancements from all three GPU brands—NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR, and Intel XeSS. Ubisoft also put out the system requirements for the four main quality-levels of the game—1080p Low, 1080p High, 1440p High, and 4K. The GPU requirements are fairly steep for 1080p High and 1440p High; and you'll need at least an RTX 3080 or RX 6800 XT for 4K premium experience. The only available Arc GPU you can buy right now is the A380, and this probably meets the 1080p Low requirements. The PC version of Skull and Bones includes ray-traced global illumination, HDR, uncapped FPS, support for ultra-widescreens, and an in-game benchmark.

Today marks a year since gamers could try out AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution technology for themselves with our spatial upscaler - FSR 1. With the introduction of FSR 2, our temporal upscaling solution earlier this year, there are now over 110 games that support FSR. The rate of uptake has been very impressive - FSR is AMD's fastest adopted software gaming technology to date.

So it seems fitting that we should pick this anniversary day to share the source code for FSR 2, opening up the opportunity for every game developer to integrate FSR 2 if they wish, and add their title to the 24 games which have already announced support. As always, the source code is being made available via GPUOpen under the MIT license, and you can now find links to it on our dedicated FSR 2 page.

The ambitious performance enhancement by Intel Graphics rivaling NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR, the Intel XeSS (Xe Super Sampling,) will debut on May 20, 2022, with a patch for "Dolmen," developer Massive Work Studio announced. This matches our report from March 2022 that referenced an "early Summer" debut. This would mean Intel Graphics has a driver release planned very soon, for its Xe LP-based iGPUs and Iris Xe MAX discrete GPU; as well as the first round of Arc 3 "Alchemist" mobile graphics, which will launch with XeSS support.

Much like FSR and DLSS, XeSS works with a supported game to render raster 3D scenes at a lower resolution than the display resolution, and upscales them using a sophisticated algorithm that minimizes image quality loss, with a net gain in frame-rates. XeSS will play a particularly big role in Intel's plans to grab a slice of the gaming graphics market with its Arc "Alchemist" discrete GPUs. XeSS appears to work similar to AMD FSR 2.0, with its upscaler using motion-vectors and temporal data from the game engine to reconstruct details in the outbound frames. Also, much like FSR, XeSS will be open to GPUs from other brands.Update May 17th: The Dolmen Twitter handle just put out an update that XeSS support is coming "this Summer," implying that it will not release on May 20 as earlier reported.

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the breakthrough AMD RDNA2 gaming architecture, include process optimizations and software and firmware enhancements, and offer high-bandwidth, low-latency AMD Infinity Cache memory technology and ultra-fast 18 Gbps GDDR6 memory. They also support Microsoft Windows 11 and Microsoft DirectX 12 Ultimate, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), the forthcoming AMD FSR 2.0 and AMD Radeon Super Resolution upscaling technologies, as well as other advanced features that provide visually stunning, high-refresh rate gaming experiences.

AMD today unveiled FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 (FSR 2.0), the second major update to the company's ambitious gaming performance enhancement that seeks to improve performance with minimal loss of image quality, by lowering game render resolution, and applying a high-quality upscaling algorithm. The star-attraction with FSR 2.0 is its new upscaling algorithm that leverages temporal data. Data from past generated frames is used to predict and add details to the current frame. This improves image quality across all presets of FSR, and at all resolutions. In some cases, the "Performance" preset of FSR 2.0 may end up looking on par with the "Quality" preset of FSR 1.0. AMD's temporal upscaling algorithm doesn't need any machine-learning hardware on the GPU.

AMD is working to integrate FSR 2.0 with several contemporary game engines, and titles that are both already released or in development. It seems like an upcoming patch of "Deathloop" will add FSR 2.0 support, since the company exclusively used the game in its image-quality comparison previews. AMD will deliver a more elaborate presentation, with an under-the-hood look at how FSR 2.0 works, in its GDC 2022 presentation slated for March 23, 2022. The company is looking to release FSR 2.0 to gamers within Q2-2022 (between April to June).

AMD today introduced Radeon Super Resolution (RSR), a new performance enhancement feature that's designed to improve frame-rates of thousands of games, whether or not they feature support for it. Put simply, RSR is a high-quality upscaling algorithm derived from FidelityFX Super Resolution 1.0, which is located on the driver-side, rather than game-side. In games that support FSR, the 3D scene rendered at a lower resolution is put through the FSR upscaler algorithm before post-processing and HUD are applied to its result. RSR doesn't require game-level integration, because it requires the game to simply run at a lower resolution than the display's native resolution; so it could act like a high-quality image upscaling algorithm.

This means that thousands of games can benefit from RSR, as the feature is agnostic to what it's upscaling. There are a couple of wrinkles, though. First, you'll need a Radeon RX 5000 or RX 6000 series GPU, based on the RDNA or RDNA2 graphics architectures. The older "Vega" or "Polaris" architectures don't support it. "Vega" is still a current architecture, given that Ryzen 5000 series processors with Radeon Graphics, use a "Vega" based iGPU. The feature should, however, work with the RDNA2-based iGPU of the Ryzen 6000 "Rembrandt" processor. The second big catch is that since RSR comes later down the rendering pipeline than even HUD application, you may notice low-quality HUDs in some games—especially RTS or RPGs with large cluttered HUDs and inventory icons. RSR is being released through the AMD Software 22.3.1 update today.

We explored RSR in greater technical detail, and tested its performance and image quality for you in our Radeon Super Resolution article.

AMD is scheduled to hold an event discussing "Next-Generation Image Upscaling for Games" at the Game Developers Conference on March 23. The event only includes a brief description that "AMD will present some of the results of their research in the domain of next-generation image upscaling technology" but the developer of CapFrameX has recently claimed to see footage from FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2.0 so AMD may be preparing to announce the technology imminently.

The developer claims that FSR 2.0 switches to a temporal upscaling approach with optimized anti-aliasing that doesn't require AI acceleration unlike DLSS & XeSS meaning that it can work with GPUs from multiple vendors. The technology can also allegedly improve image quality beyond native resolution but we will need to wait for the official announcement and reviews before reaching any conclusions.

AMD released the FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) plugin for Unreal Engine 4, allowing game developers to integrate the performance enhancement technology with their games. A competing technology to NVIDIA DLSS, FSR lets gamers improve frame-rates of their games by trading off quality. At the higher "Quality" presets, this quality loss is supposed to be practically unnoticeable, but with significant improvements to frame-rates. We detailed how the technology works in our article that gets under its hood and evaluates performance. At its launch, AMD listed out a broad list of launch partners for the technology, but Unreal was a notable absentee. Over the following months, AMD appears to have worked toward bringing the tech to even UE4. The plugin is being distributed through AMD's GPUOpen portal.

DOWNLOAD: AMD FSR Plugin for Unreal Engine 4

Stephanie Brenham, Team Lead Programmer for Ubisoft's upcoming AAA Far Cry 6, recently spoke to WCCFTech on the upcoming Far Cry installment. Stephanie went into some detail regarding the graphics and performance options, and an interesting fact that surfaced was that neither Sony's PS5 nor Microsoft's Xbox Series consoles will feature ray tracing enabled on their respective versions of the game. Apparently, ray tracing will be a PC-exclusive feature, as console versions of the game are targeting higher render resolution and more fluid framerates over expensive graphics options such as ray tracing. And even on PC, it'll be a hybrid form of it, and not a full implementation: ray tracing is supported for both shadows and reflections, but Ubisoft opted for a hybrid approach here, marrying traditional rendering with ray tracing so as to improve performance in mainstream PC hardware.

"Ray tracing is a PC-only feature," Stephanie Brenham said. "On console, our objective has been to take advantage of new hardware capabilities, optimizing performance targeting 4K and achieving 60 FPS." This does somewhat fall in the face of performance expectations set by both Sony and Microsoft; both companies made (and still make) extensive use of ray tracing support on the marketing campaigns for their consoles. However, as we've seen in the past, enabling ray tracing comes with severe performance penalties in even the latest and greatest PC hardware (sometimes not to best effect, even), which still outclasses even the latest consoles' powerful innards (compared to their predecessors, of course).

AMD's Fidelity Super Resolution (FSR) tech is being implemented in RPSCS3, one of the foremost emulators for Sony's Playstation 3. The emulator allows PC users to play otherwise PS3-exclusive games via software emulation. The nature of this emulation, however, leads to a couple important aspects. One pertains to performance: emulating non-existent hardware is one of the most resource-hungry workloads one can think of, and is highly dependent on the emulator's coding quality. Another is that since this is a software solution, it does allow to changes in maximum render resolution, for example, or the addition of visual effects or other modifications to the rendering pipeline. One limitation of this approach is that game support has to be added almost manually, checking and correcting the emulators' behaviors according to the software being played.

AMD's FSR tech been received with a rather enthusiastic response. This is in part due to its open source nature, but also because of its apparent ease of implementation and its higher compatibility with graphics cards new, old, and from the competition - unlike NVIDIA's DLSS, which requires specific hardware (Tensor cores) to be present in the GPU chip, locking it to only the latest NVIDIA products. This nature of FSR has led to its integrationn on the RPCS3 emulator, promising a relatively easy to implement performance and image quality increase compared to the original rendering pipeline, including 4K upscaling. Check after the break for a video of the tech in action (spoiler: the quality difference isn't nearly as close as what the thumbnail implies).

RPCS3 is an open-source PlayStation 3 emulator which currently boasts compatibility with 61% of the 2278 games released for the console and limited compatibility with a further 31%. The developers behind the emulator have recently announced the addition of AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) support which they note is the first for any console emulator. This implementation performs the upscaling at the end of the graphics pipeline which may introduce issues on certain titles. The feature can be enabled within the settings menu under the GPU section and the sharpening strength can be adjusted from 1 - 100%.

RPCS3RPCS3 is now the first game console emulator to support FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR)

The first console game to receive AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) support appears to be the cooperative shooter Arcadegeddon on the PlayStation 5. AMD FSR support is currently limited to a handful of PC titles but we expect the list to grow quickly given the integration of the technology into Unity, Unreal Engine, and the Xbox Game Development Kit. Sony hasn't publically confirmed that AMD FSR has been integrated into the PlayStation SDK however after this recent announcement the addition seems likely. The integration of AMD Super Resolution technology into these development tools will enable much faster integration of the feature into new and existing titles.

AMD today in a blog post announced several updates to the FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) technology, its performance enhancement rivaling NVIDIA DLSS, which lets gamers dial up performance with minimal loss to image quality. To begin with, the company released the source code of the technology to the public under its GPUOpen initiative, under the MIT license. This makes it tremendously easy (and affordable) for game developers to implement the tech. Inspecting the source, we find that FSR relies heavily on a multi-pass Lanczos algorithm for image upscaling. Next up, we learn that close to two dozen games are already in the process of receiving FSR support. Lastly, it's announced that Unity and Unreal Engine support FSR.

AMD broadly detailed how FSR works in its June 2021 announcement of the technology. FSR sits within the render pipeline of a game, where an almost ready lower-resolution frame that's been rendered, tone-mapped, and anti-aliased, is processed by FSR in a two-pass process implemented as a shader, before the high-resolution output is passed on to post-processing effects that introduce noise (such as film-grain). HUD and other in-game text (such as subtitles), are natively rendered at the target (higher) resolution and applied post render. The FSR component makes two passes—upscaling, and sharpening. We learn from the source code that the upscaler is based on the Lanczos algorithm, which was invented in 1979. Media PC enthusiasts will know Lanczos from MadVR, which has offered various movie upscaling algorithms in the past. AMD's implementation of Lanczos-2 is different than the original—it skips the expensive sin(), rcp() and sqrt() instructions and implements them in a faster way. AMD also added additional logic to avoid the ringing effects that are often observed on images processed with Lanczos.

Microsoft seems to be throwing its hat in the image upscale battle that's currently raging between NVIDIA and AMD. The company has added two new job openings to its careers page: one for a Senior Software Engineer and another for a Principal Software Engineer for Graphics. Those job openings would be quite innocent by themselves; however, once we cut through the chaff, it becomes clear that the Senior Software Engineer is expected to "implement machine learning algorithms in graphics software to delight millions of gamers," while working closely with "partners" to develop software for "future machine learning hardware" - partners here could be first-party titles or even the hardware providers themselves (read, AMD). AMD themselves have touted a DirectML upscaling solution back when they first introduced their FidelityFX program - and FSR clearly isn't it.

It is interesting how Microsoft posted these job openings in June 30th - a few days after AMD's reveal of their FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) solution for all graphics cards - and which Microsoft themselves confirmed would be implemented in the Xbox product stack, where applicable. Of course, that there is one solution available already does not mean companies should rest on their laurels - AMD is surely at work on improving its FSR tech as we speak, and Microsoft has seen the advantages on having a pure ML-powered image upscaling solution thanks to NVIDIA's DLSS. Whether Microsoft's solution with DirectML will improve on DLSS as it exists at time of launch (if ever) is, of course, unknowable at this point.

NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology has been developed to upscale lower resolutions using artificial intelligence and deep learning algorithms. By using this technique, users with RTX cards can increase their framerates in supported games, with minimal loss in image quality. Recently, AMD introduced FidelityFX Super Resolution, a competing technology, which in one aspect might be technologically better than the DLSS competition. How you might wonder? Well, at the "quality" setting, NVIDIA's DLSS renders the game at 66.6% of the resolution, upscaling it 1.5 times. At the same "quality" preset, AMD FSR renders the game at 77% of the resolution and upscales the image by 1.3 times. This is technically providing an advantage to AMD FSR technology, as the image is posed to look better with less upscaling. DLSS on the other hand uses much more information, because it considers multiple frames in its temporal algorithm.

That newfound competition could be what made NVIDIA re-think their options and today we are getting some exciting news regarding DLSS. In the Unreal Engine 5 (UE5) documentation, there is a placeholder for "Ultra Quality" DLSS mode, which is supposed to rival AMD's "Ultra Quality" mode and offer the best possible image quality. Currently, the latest DLSS version is 2.2.6.0, which is present in some DLSS supported games, and can be added to others using a DLL-swap. The updated version with the Ultra Quality preset is already present in UE5, called DLSS 2.2.9.0. Mr. Alexander Battaglia from Digital Foundry has made a quick comparison using the two versions, however, we are waiting for more in-depth testing to see the final results.

Just a few days ago, we have reviewed AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution technology, which represents an answer to NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling technology used to upscale images t certain resolutions. As the review predicted, AMD's presence in consoles like PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S must result in the integration of the technology in that field, not only the PC space. And today seems to be the day that Microsoft and AMD join forces to bring AMD's FSR technology to consoles. In the latest Xbox Game Development Kit preview, Microsoft is shipping AMD's FSR tech, giving game developers an easy way to integrate it into the games and thus manipulate resolution to give us the best possible frame rates.

Jason Ronald (Twitter)Excited to continue our close partnership with @AMD and see what game developers can do with FidelityFX Super Resolution, available to preview in our GDK today for @Windows, @Xbox Series X|S and #XboxOne consoles.

AMD's DLSS competitor FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) is going to be launched in a mere five days, on June 22nd. When AMD announced the technology last month, they used Godfall as a showcase for the improved performance characteristics of the technology, which should aid (particularly) in raytracing.enabled games. Being open source, AMD's FSR also supports NVIDIA's graphics cards, meaning that any game that bakes in support for the technology can be taken advantage of by PC players irrespective of GPU brand.

In the meantime, the launch titles for FSR have become known, and there are seven of them, though they're relatively small hitters (Anno 1800 is one of the supported games at launch). However, support for FSR is expected to launch in the near future for 12 more games, including heavy-hitter Baldur's Gate III, DOTA 2, Far Cry 6, Myst, Resident Evil Village and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodhunt. Besides these closer-to-the-horizon games, a number of developers have announced they're working on integration FSR on their workflows, including Crystal Dynamics, Focus Home Interactive, Capcom, Ubisoft, Unity, Electronic Arts & Dice... A total of 44 developers in all, Of course NVIDIA's DLSS supports much more games - but remember it has two years in the market going for it, and remember that DLSS 1.0 wasn't all that good. So comparisons with NVIDIA's solution and claims of failure or disappointment on AMD's technology might be slightly too early judgments, especially considering how this tech has also been announced to be supported by Microsoft's Xbox Series X|S consoles.

AMD has announced that Microsoft's Xbox Series S|X now features support for the company's FidelityFX suite. This move, which enabled previously PC-centric technologies on Microsoft's latest-generation gaming consoles, will bring feature parity between RDNA 2-powered graphics, and will eventually enable support for AMD's FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution), the company's eventual competition to NVIDIA's DLSS tech.

This means that besides the technologies that are part of the DX 12 Ultimate spec (and which the consoles already obviously support), developers now have access to AMD's Fidelity FX technologies such as Contrast Adaptive Sharpening, Variable Rate Shading, ray traced shadow Denoiser, Ambient Occlusion and Screen Space Reflections. All of these AMD-led developments in the SDK allow for higher performance and/or better visual fidelity. However, the icing on the cake should be the FSR support, which could bring the Series X's 8K claims to bear (alongside high-refresh-rate 4K gaming) - should FSR turn out be in a similar performance-enhancing ballpark as NVIDIA's DLSS, which we can't really know for sure at this stage (and likely neither can AMD). No word on Fidelity FX support on the PS5 has been announced at this time, which does raise the question of its eventual support, or if Sony will enable a similar feature via their own development tools.

AMD, via its CVP & GM at AMD Radeon Scott Herkelman, confirmed in video with PCWorld that the company's counterpart to NVIDIA's DLSS technology - which he defines as the most important piece of software currently in development from a graphics perspective - is coming along nicely. Launch of the technology is currently planned for later this year. Scott Herkelman further confirmed that there is still a lot of work to do on the technology before it's ready for prime time, but in the meantime, it has an official acronym: FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution). If you're unfamiliar with DLSS, it's essentially an NVIDIA-locked, proprietary upscaling algorithm that has been implemented in a number of games now, which leverages Machine Learning hardware capabilities (tensor cores) to upscale a game with minimal impact to visual quality. It's important because it allows for much higher performance in even the latest, most demanding titles - especially when they implement raytracing.

As has been the case with AMD, its standing on upscaling technologies defends a multiplatform, compatible approach that only demands implementation of open standards to run in users' systems. The idea is to achieve the broadest possible spectrum of game developers and gamers, with tight, seamless integration with the usual game development workflow. This is done mostly via taking advantage of Microsoft's DirectML implementation that's baked straight into DX 12.