AMD today via its newly released GPUOpen website has announced that it is adding four new graphics technologies to its FidelityFX software stack. Before you ask, no; there is no included Ray Tracing graphics libraries among these four new technologies. However, considering the use-case for these is to give developers an almost plug-in flexibility on various graphics technologies they would otherwise have to find other ways to integrate in their rendering pass, added layers to GPUOpen are always a welcome sight. And rest assured that "classic" shading techniques will still be widely used even in the advent of top to bottom raytracing capabilities on graphics hardware - which likely won't happen in the next GPU hardware generation anyway.

Added technologies to the previously-released Contrast Adaptive Sharpening are libraries for SSSR (Stochastic Screen Space Reflections) for better reflections without the usage of raytracing; CACAO (Combined Adaptive Compute Ambient Occlusion) for added depth to shadows and object quality; LPM (Luminance Preserving Mapper) for eased application of an HDR rendering pipeline with correct values, preventing overblown details; and SPD (Single Pass Downsampler) which will allow developers to seamlessly downsample required assets (think something along the lines of Variable Rate Shading) to achieve FPS targets. The GPUOpen is an effort from AMD to create an open graphics library that will allow developers to easily integrate AMD-optimized technologies to their graphics workflow.AMD
Today, we are excited to introduce you to the new additions to the FidelityFX family. As many of you will know already, FidelityFX was announced last year with the first of our open source effects, Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS). Since then we've been absolutely delighted to see the community embrace CAS and FidelityFX.

That's why we are now expanding our FidelityFX family with four new members: Stochastic Screen Space Reflections (SSSR), Combined Adaptive Compute Ambient Occlusion (CACAO), Luminance Preserving Mapper (LPM), and Single Pass Downsampler (SPD).

FidelityFX SSSR - Stochastic Screen Space Reflections
That would be us! The first of our four new FidelityFX effects is Stochastic Screen Space Reflections (SSSR). This is our implementation of the ever popular Screen Space Reflections technique. This effect can create realistic looking reflections, purely based on information already present in the rendered image.

FidelityFX CACAO - Combined Adaptive Compute Ambient Occlusion
FidelityFX CACAO stands for Combined Adaptive Compute Ambient Occlusion and is based on Intel's Adaptive Screen Space Ambient Occlusion, however our team has been busy tinkering and optimizing it. First of all, we moved the entire thing over to compute, allowing you the freedom to run it on either a compute or graphics queue. We've also done some major surgery on the data-transformations the effect undertakes. Finally, we also included an upsampler option to allow you to get high quality ambient occlusion within a budget that suits your game.

FidelityFX LPM - Luminance Preserving Mapper
Ensure all that effort you put into lighting and shading your scenes is nicely carried through to the screen. FidelityFX LPM (Luminance Preserving Mapper) provides fast and easy-to-integrate HDR and wide gamut tone and gamut mapping for your game.

FidelityFX SPD - Single Pass Downsampler
Almost every game will need to downsample something at some point. Perhaps you're moving a buffer to a lower resolution for performance reasons, or maybe you're generating a MIPmap chain. The standard way of doing this is simple, but potentially introduces lots of bubbles into the graphics pipeline. Pop those bubbles by using FidelityFX SPD, our Single Pass Downsampler that can generate up to 12 MIPmap levels in a single compute shader pass.