What you need to know
- AMD FSR has been the company's upscaling solution to compete with NVIDIA's DLSS.
- NVIDIA DLSS has a 2.0 version, and now so too does AMD FSR.
- FSR 2.0 will arrive in games starting in Q2 2022, including support for popular titles such as Deathloop.
If you liked AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, then you're going to love AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0. At least, AMD hopes you will when the upgraded version of its temporal upscaling solution arrives in games beginning Q2 2022.
You'll have to wait a while longer for a proper laundry list of games featuring FSR 2.0, but for starters, expect it to play well with Deathloop (the game with one of the wildest original songs of all time) and Forspoken. And get this: AMD FSR 2.0 will also be fully supported on Xbox, meaning devs can utilize the power of the Xbox Series X even more than before if they so choose. Given that the technology is open source just like the original 1.0 version was, there are few barriers to entry.
To understand the computer science behind FidelityFX Super Resolution, you'll need to have a working knowledge of depth, motion vectors, and color. For those of you who don't want to get into the minutia, here's the long and short of how the tech works: It boosts your framerate while maintaining on-screen visuals close to those of whatever the game is being natively displayed at. In other words, in exchange for nearly imperceptible adjustments to your game's resolution and visuals, you'll get higher framerates. That's the concept, at least; execution varies on a game-by-game basis.
FSR 2.0 will offer three modes: Quality, balanced, and performance. They operate exactly as you'd imagine they would, with quality focusing on retaining visual fidelity while performance emphasizes maximizing framerate boosts. If you want more details on AMD's tech, check out the company's blog post.
With all that said, FSR is not a cure-all for performance; you'll still need one of the best graphics cards to power your PC gaming experience. And if you want to know the difference between AMD FSR and NVIDIA DLSS, we have a guide on that topic.
