Introduction

Last Friday, AMD announced that the first five games have been released with official support for AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.1 (FSR 3.1) upscaling and Frame Generation. This is the first quality-improving update for FSR for quite some time, the last one was version 2.2.1, which released a year ago. In this article we're taking a look at the company's new upscaling technology in Horizon Forbidden West. Other titles with FSR 3.1 support are Ratchet and Clank, Spider-Man Remastered, Spider-Man Miles Morales, Ghost of Tsushima and God of War Ragnarök (out soon). These are all Sony PS5 exclusives brought to the PC by Nixxes, who are famous for their top-notch ports. I guess this means that AMD sat down with Nixxes and gave them some extra love, to help them implement FSR 3.1 in their games.



While the community often uses "DLSS 3" and "FSR 3" to specifically mean "frame generation," please do note that "FSR 3.1" does include updates for both upscaling and frame generation.

Technology

According to AMD, FSR 3.1 upscaling has "improved image quality, focusing on improved temporal stability, reduced flickering and shimmering, enhanced ghosting reduction and better detail preservation." This is possible thanks to internal tweaks of how the algorithm is treating high/low frequency signals during the upscale process.


Arguably the most important and long-awaited feature of the FSR 3.1 update is upscaling and Frame Generation being decoupled. Basically, this allows using XeSS, DLSS or DLAA in conjunction with FSR Frame Generation. Previously, AMD used some intermediate data from the upscaler step as input for the frame generation code to improve performance (so that the information doesn't have to be generated twice). With FSR 3.1, AMD has added an optional API for game developers to use, to generate this data separately, so that FSR Frame Generation can be used with other upscalers (this costs a small amount of GPU time though).


Before you ask, yes, you can run FSR Frame Generation without any upscaling method (or combine it with FSR/DLSS/DLAA/XeSS).


FSR 3.1 also supports the new FidelityFX API, making AMD's upscaler even easier to add to games, and it enables independent upgrading of the FSR DLL, without having to recompile the game's code. This doesn't mean that FSR 3.1 support can be added to existing FSR 2 games by just dropping the FSR 3 DLL into the game folder. In order to upgrade to the new version, developers will have to make some code changes first. Future updates should be more seamless though, probably identical to how you can update the DLSS DLL in other games.

Image Quality

Below, you will find comparison screenshots of Horizon Forbidden West at 4K, 1440p, 1080p, and in different XeSS, FSR and DLSS quality modes; the TAA, DLAA, native FSR 3.1/XeSS and DLSS/FSR 3.1 Frame Generation screenshots are also available in the dropdown menu. If you want to see how these technologies perform in motion, watch our side-by-side comparison video, which can help uncover issues that are not visible in the still image screenshots, such as shimmering or temporal instability.

Our main testing was conducted using a GeForce RTX 4080 GPU at "Very High" graphics settings. We also used a GeForce RTX 3060 and Radeon RX 7900 XT for additional testing. Motion blur, depth of field, film grain and chromatic aberration were disabled for better image viewing. DLSS Super Resolution and DLSS Frame Generation in this game shipped with version 3.5.10.

Screenshots

Side-by-Side Comparison Video

Conclusion

First of all, we'd like to congratulate AMD on their new release, which not only positively impacts gamers with Radeon cards, but also people with GeForce and Intel Arc hardware. The ability to run FSR Frame Generation independently of the actual upscaler is huge. It means that FSR Frame Generation has the potential to become the de facto frame generation solution for all gamers, because it works on all hardware—AMD, NVIDIA and Intel. Especially for gamers with older NVIDIA GeForce cards this is a godsend, because NVIDIA's own DLSS 3 Frame Generation technology requires a GeForce 40 card.

To alleviate any concerns over the GPU hardware used, we tested FSR 3.1 upscaling and Frame Generation not only a GeForce RTX 4080 GPU, but also a GeForce RTX 3060 and Radeon RX 7900 XT, to see how FSR 3.1 upscaling and Frame Generation would perform on different GPU architectures—the results were identical.

Image Quality

Unfortunately, there are some major issues with the FSR 3.1 upscaling implementation in Horizon Forbidden West. The first problem is that FSR 3.1 upscaling has significantly worse ghosting and smearing artifacts on small flying objects, such as snow, dust or flying birds in the distance when compared to FSR 2.2, across all resolutions. To be fair, the ghosting and smearing artifacts were also an issue with FSR 2.2, but only at lower output resolutions such as 1080p and 1440p, and to a much lesser degree—with FSR 3.1 they are visible even at 4K FSR 3.1 "Quality" mode. The amount of excessive ghosting and smearing is very similar to what we observed with XeSS 1.2 in our initial launch day review, but the problem was completely fixed when the game was updated to use XeSS 1.3, suggesting this is a problem with the game engine, not with FSR itself. We hope that a similar fix releases soon to benefit those wanting to use FSR 3.1. Another issue is related to how the sharpening filter works. FSR 3.1 now uses different amounts of sharpening, even when the sharpening slider is set to an equal value for all upscaling and antialiasing solutions. Compared to FSR 2.2 for example, the FSR 3.1 image often looks softer at the same slider settings.

Pixelation in Motion

In our previous reviews of FSR 2.2/3.0 implementations we've often seen major issues with pixelation in motion, shimmering, or flickering in vegetation—those artifacts were very common across multiple games. That's why we closely examined this during our FSR 3.1 testing, expecting major improvements. We can confirm that the amount of pixelation in motion is lowered with the FSR 3.1 update, even at low resolutions such as 1080p. However, the actual amount of visible pixelation in motion will vary depending on how much motion is happening on screen. For example: when simply running around at a standard speed, not sprinting, there's noticeably less pixelation compared to the FSR 2.2 image, but as soon as you start sprinting, FSR 3.1 is only slightly better. Essentially, this means that slower-paced sequences of the game will receive some improvement in image stability, while more action-packed and fast-paced sequences will look almost the same as before, which is a bit disappointing.

Particle Effect Stability

Particle effect rendering and their temporal stability is another important aspect of image quality. Unfortunately, there is only a very small difference between FSR 2.2 and FSR 3.1 when it comes to particle effect details, such as neon-like signs, smoke and fire effects, waterfalls, or sea waves. The FSR 3.1 image still produces noticeable degradation in those particle effects, resulting in a blurrier image in motion. These temporal instabilities are especially visible in waterfalls and sea waves, and when comparing FSR 3.1 to DLSS, or even XeSS 1.3 in its DP4a mode, the differences are still very significant in favor of both DLSS and XeSS 1.3. In our side-by-side comparison video we specifically contrast particle effect rendering between the competing upscalers, where issues with FSR 3.1 are visible even without zooming in on the image.

Frame Generation

On the other hand, the image quality of FSR 3.1 Frame Generation is excellent. In Horizon Forbidden West, when using DLSS as the base image for both Frame Generation solutions, we didn't see any major differences in image quality between AMD's and NVIDIA's Frame Generation solutions, which is a very good thing. The only exception is a slightly softer overall image in motion with FSR 3.1 Frame Generation, specifically at 1080p resolution.

Now all we need is for adoption rates in games to increase significantly, which should be much easier now. The FSR 3.1 update expands the supported hardware base for frame generation close to 100%, because FSR 3.1 will run on all cards from NVIDIA, AMD and Intel (except for some very old ones). For developers this should justify the resources spent on adding FSR Frame Generation support.

With the ability to enable FSR Frame Generation with any antialiasing or upscaling solution, including DLSS or DLAA, we can now properly test AMD's Frame Generation image quality without artifacts introduced by FSR upscaling, directly comparing it to NVIDIA's Frame Generation.

Performance

Regarding performance, the FSR 3.1 upscaling implementation does not offer further improvements in performance compared to FSR 2.2, essentially offering the same performance gains as DLSS (which is good). In Horizon Forbidden West, the upscaling performance increase is around 25% in "Quality" mode compared to native rendering at 4K resolution, and around 20% at 1440p and 1080p resolutions. XeSS 1.3 has slightly different performance gains due to alternative resolution scaling values in its presets. With DLSS Super Resolution or FSR 3.1 in "Quality" mode and Frame Generation enabled, you can expect almost doubled performance across all resolutions compared to native rendering.