I can’t get excited about AMD’s next version of FSR anymore

AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 is available after almost a year of waiting. The company announced the feature around November last year in a quick response to Nvidia’s then-new Deep Learning Super Sampling 3 (DLSS3). AMD’s pitch was simple. The company was going to offer the same performance-multiplying feature that generates frames instead of rendering them, and it will work with any graphics card.

Now it’s here, and on paper, FSR 3 does exactly what AMD claimed. However, it’s clear that AMD has a lot of work to do to get FSR 3 working properly. And after waiting almost a year for the feature to arrive, it’s hard to bet on the promises of what FSR 3 could be in the future.

Where are the games?

There are plenty of great games to start with in FSR 3. AMD has launched this feature in two games released this year: Predicted And And Amar. Both launched to a critical and commercial “meh” from the gaming community. Predicted In an otherwise dull time of year, the launch saw some attention and immortals The maximum number of players on Steam never reached above 1,000.

Regardless of what you think about these games, they are not good candidates for launching some new, game-changing technology. Compare this to DLSS 3.5 with Ray Reconstruction, which not only launched cyberpunk 2077 But with the much-awaited 2.0 update of the game. This way you introduce a feature that gamers will get excited about.

Nvidia certainly holds a dominant position in the GPU market, so it’s able to do things like time the release of a major game expansion as well as a new feature. AMD, being far from the market leader, may not have as much influence with developers. Regardless, AMD has put its stamp on some of the biggest game releases this year, all of which lack FSR 3.

AMD’s badge appears Resident Evil 4, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, The Last of Us Part One, And recently, P’s lie. easily the biggest mistake Starfield, Especially after AMD promoted being a “PC Exclusive Partner” for the game. All these games are also absent from AMD’s list of upcoming FSR 3 games. The biggest title in the list is cyberpunk 2077, But we still don’t know when FSR 3 will come to that game.

I have no doubt that FSR 3 will start appearing in more games throughout the rest of the year and into next year. This is how these rollouts work. FSR 3 is being launched Predicted And and immortals However, isn’t AMD performing at its best, especially with heavy hitters like Starfield And Star Wars Jedi: Survivors Sitting on the back burner.

agreement

The compromise for FSR 3’s weak support at launch appears to be AMD Fluid Motion Frames. it is No FSR3 (at least not in name). Fluid Motion Frames is a driver-level feature available for RX 7000 and RX 6000 graphics cards that adds frame interpolation to DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 games. Fluid Motion Frames and FSR3 both offer frame interpolation, but FSR3 is built into the game while Fluid Motion Frames happens at the driver level.

This is a very important difference. FSR3, built into the game engine, is part of the rendering process. The Fluid Motion Frames sits on top via the driver. FSR3 can access information such as motion vectors and overlays in the game engine to render a cleaner final image. Can’t frame fluid motion.

AMD has made it clear that Fluid Motion Frames is still in its early days. It is only available through a preview (beta) driver and with some strict conditions. It makes sense that AMD took this approach because of the need for Fluid Motion Frames Very Useful.

For starters, it doesn’t always work. I recommend watching Daniel Owens’ bio below for a more in-depth look. Cyberpunk 2077. Essentially, Fluid Motion Frame compares two sequential frames and uses them to predict what the middle frame will look like. This doesn’t always work. As you can see in the breakdown, Fluid Motion Frames will stop working and temporarily shut down if there is too much of a difference between two frames. According to AMD’s latest patch notes, this is part of the design.

If you’re walking in a straight line or turning slowly, you’ll notice a smoother boost in Fluid Motion frames. If you’re at any kind of fast speed, where you need the extra smoothness most, the feature essentially does nothing. I’d argue that this also makes the gameplay experience worse, since you’re jumping between very high and relatively low frame rates whenever you’re in motion. A locked 60 frames per second (fps) looks and feels better than a frame rate constantly jumping up to 120 fps and up to 60 fps.

There are other problems that AMD didn’t address when it announced Fluid Motion Frames. For example, Fluid Motion Frame will try to interpolate frames even if you’re in a menu, turning fine text and menu selection fields into a mess of artifacts. However, the dealbreaker for me is the base frame rate requirements.

AMD says you need to have a base frame rate of at least 55 fps for a 1080p display, and at least 70 fps for a 1440p display for Fluid Motion Frames to work properly. What happens if you go below that? Below, you can see On Hogwarts Legacy 4K with ray tracing on. Fluid Motion Frames cause this low frame rate to dissipate into a blurry mess that makes it look like you’re playing the game in slow motion. This video is presented through Twitter’s brutal compression, but it does benefit the gameplay experience somewhat.

This is outside of AMD’s recommendation for the technology, but it’s a good demonstration of the limitations of Fluid Motion Frames. This serves as a way to boost already high frame rates, and in a way that isn’t exactly consistent. This is especially disappointing because this feature is something you can’t get with Nvidia graphics cards, and it would be a reason to ship it on GPUs like AMD’s RX 7800 XT.

Like FSR3, I’m sure AMD will continue to iterate on Fluid Motion Frames. It’s still in preview state, so some issues can be expected. However, this is my main problem with FSR 3 and Fluid Motion Frames. We have waited a long time.

hurry up and wait

AMD’s rollout of FSR3 reminds me of how Intel handled its first generation Arch GPUs: the A750 and A770. They were announced prematurely, leading to speculation, rumors of cancellation, and high expectations. When the GPUs finally arrived, it became clear that Intel still had a lot of work to do on their drivers, which is why we’ve commonly seen stories of Intel delivering double the performance in certain games with driver updates.

Due to hasty announcement the products arrived in a half-finished state. FSR 3 seems to be the same. Almost a year after AMD released its RX 7900, we have FSR 3, but it’s nowhere near a major feature for AMD’s current generation.

We’ll see FSR3 in more games, and I’m hopeful that Fluid Motion Frames will mature into something that will be useful to AMD users. We’ve seen the same with some other software features from AMD in the past. However, even now, a far cry from the original announcement, FSR 3 still feels more like a promise than a feature.

There is a lot of potential here for FSR 3. I’ve been upfront about the fact that Nvidia is increasingly selling DLSS on the raw power of its GPUs, and AMD may be doing something similar with FSR3. This requires careful execution with game support and features that are useful to a wide range of gamers. Currently, FSR3 and Fluid Motion Frames don’t work on those fronts.

I hope FSR 3 and Fluid Motion Frames are better. But my enthusiasm for the features that were launched in November last year has almost disappeared.