AMD is readying its Fluid Motion Frames (AFMF) technology for public release later this month (January 24 to be exact). Aaron Steinman, a Senior Radeon Manager, believes that arch rival NVIDIA will need to take some drastic steps once AFMF arrives due to its more open nature. He stated in a short interaction with PC Gamer: "I would be curious to know if NVIDIA feels now they have to match what we've done in making some of these solutions driver-based." His software engineering buddies have already released the Radeon Super Resolution (RSR) technology, which functions via in-driver operation.

Unlike Team Red's heavily marketed FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) system, AFMF and RSR are not reliant on official support from games developers. The driver-based solutions will be packaged within an upcoming version of AMD's HYPR-RX feature set. Steinman continued with his statement: "I think what we're gonna start seeing, DLSS is only available on certain solutions, so either NVIDIA is going to have to benefit from our solution because we did make it open-source and cross-vendor, or they're probably going to need to do something similar." The publication points out that Team Green has something in the same ballpark—NVIDIA Image Scaling—but its nowhere near as advanced as their headlining "AI-infused" DLSS tech. Steinman conceded to PC Gamer that his main opponent will inevitably pull ahead in the future: "I mean, the competition will never end, right? We'll have new technologies, they (NVIDIA) will have new technologies."

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.

The image upscaling wars keep grassing, with AMD and NVIDIA claiming as many integrations as possible for their respective FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) and DLSS (Deep-Learning Super Sampling) technologies in a bid to achieve maximum market share for their respective technologies. While the entire world was now focusing on Intel's own addition to the image upscaling wars with its XeSS (XE SuperSampling) tech, AMD is apparently looking to introduce a new upscaling tech as early as January 2022. Enter Radeon Super Resolution (RSR).

Right off the bat, do not expect RSR to be AMD's answer to the perceived image quality advantage of NVIDIA's deep-learning-powered DLSS compared to AMD's more open (and cross-hardware compatible) FSR. Instead, AMD seems to be targeting RSR as a game-agnostic upscaling solution that's based on FSR, but which can be enabled at the Radeon driver level for any game that supports exclusive full-screen rendering. AMD is seemingly moving its image upscaling technique further up in the graphics pipeline, which should impact upscaling quality (as there's less information for the image upscaler to work with). What this does enable, however, is an agnostic solution that can be deployed in any game - provided you're rocking one of the two rumored architectures that will support RSR (RDNA and RDNA2, in the form of AMD's RX-5000 and RX-6000 series). Considering the expected release of RSR, it's likely that AMD will have an official announcement around CES 2022, despite the fact that the company won't be physically present due to COVID-19 and logistics concerns.