Introduction

After three months of exclusivity on the Epic Games Store, Tiny Tina's Wonderlands has been released on Steam, and the game was also updated with support for AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 (FSR 2.0). Tiny Tina's Wonderlands doesn't support any other upscaling solutions, so we will compare FSR 2.0 to the native image in this review. Depending on the game, there are subtle differences in the implementation of FSR 2.0, which we are keen to find out more about.



Below, you will find comparison screenshots at 4K, 1440p, 1080p, and in different FSR 2.0 quality modes. For those who want to see how FSR 2.0 performs in motion, watch our side-by-side comparison video. The video can help uncover issues like shimmering or temporal instability, which are not visible in the screenshots.

All tests were made using a GeForce RTX 3080 GPU at Ultra graphics settings with motion blur and depth of field disabled.

Screenshots

Side-by-Side Comparison Video

Conclusion

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands has an option to launch the game in DirectX 11 or DirectX 12 mode, and FSR 2.0 only supports the DirectX 12 API in this game. If you were playing the game in DirectX 11 mode, DirectX 12 now has to be enabled in order to utilize FSR 2.0. Important about the FSR 2.0 implementation in this game is that FSR 2.0 has a separate sharpness slider in the settings menu, so players have the ability to tune it from 0 to 1.0. The sharpness slider might slightly improve texture details at a distance, but also introduces visual artifacts on bright materials, such as lamp lights, weapon scopes or magic circles on weapons where the circle glows brightly and blinks in motion, especially at lower resolutions, so we didn't use any sharpening filters for our testing.

Speaking of image quality, FSR 2.0 improves the quality of vegetation, grass in particular, by eliminating shimmering compared to the native image across all resolutions. Based on our previous FSR 2.0 testing, FSR 2.0 was also dealing with thin objects better than the native image—wires, for example—but Tiny Tina's Wonderlands implementation is different. On still images, thin objects will look the same as at the native resolution, but when you start moving around, image stability of thin objects with FSR 2.0 enabled just falls apart. Also, with FSR 2.0 enabled, you can clearly see the texture quality reduction at even 4K resolution. In our screenshots, take a look at the quality of the ground textures near the player and rooftops at long distances. You can slightly improve the texture quality by enabling the FSR sharpening filter, but the sharpening itself creates the other image quality issues described earlier, so there's a trade-off to the image quality.

In terms of performance, the FSR 2.0 performance uplift at 4K resolution is a great improvement to the game even in Quality mode, but 1440p and 1080p have issues. At 1080p and 1440p FSR 2.0, the performance decrease is definitely noticeable. It's not an error on our end, but due to the FSR 2.0 implementation in this game. The first thing you might think of with these results is that it's just a CPU bottleneck, but that is not the case, or at least not completely. The issue with decreased performance is only present during gameplay and if the framerate is close to 100 or above as the in-game benchmark tool works as intended with accurate performance gains, as do the title screen or pause menu, which still render the game in the background in real time. It's important to note that a GTX 1060 or RX 580, for example, most likely won't be affected by these performance reduction issues due to the generally much lower GPU performance. We are still unsure about what exactly is causing these performance issues, we suspect the developers implemented the FSR 2.0 render path itself incorrectly.