When AMD launched the Radeon RX 5700 series last year, it also introduced FidelityFX, an open-source toolkit of RDNA architecture-optimized effects that developers could implement with minimal performance overhead. Only Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS) was available at its inception, but now, four more awesome effects have joined the family: FidelityFX Screen Space Reflections, FidelityFX Ambient Occlusion, FidelityFX HDR Mapper, and FidelityFX Downsampler.
“In 2019 we released our first AMD FidelityFX feature, Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS),” wrote AMD. “This effect is now used in over 15 games to enable better visual sharpness with minimal artifacts, restoring detail lost after Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA) is applied. Now we are expanding FidelityFX into an open-source image quality developer toolkit with four additional shader-based features aimed at improving rendering quality and performance.”
Check out the links below for on/off slider comparisons:
FidelityFX Screen Space Reflections: Our implementation of Stochastic Screen Space Reflections (SSSR) delivers high-quality reflections with minimal overhead, via an optimized compute shader and RDNA architecture-optimized denoising.
FidelityFX Ambient Occlusion: Our RDNA architecture-optimized Combined Adaptive Compute Ambient Occlusion (CACAO) effect dynamically and efficiently helps improve the appearance of objects based their exposure to ambient light.
FidelityFX HDR Mapper: Optimized for use with AMD FreeSync Premium Pro1 displays, AMD’s Luminance Preserving Mapper (LPM) delivers superior HDR and wide color gamut content for games.
FidelityFX Downsampler: Single-pass and optimized for RDNA architecture, AMD’s compute shader-based Single Pass Downsampler (SPD) generates texture MIP levels using asynchronous compute for optimal performance.
AMD also relaunched the website for its middleware software suite today, GPUOpen, which competes against NVIDIA GameWorks through the support of fully open-source software.
“AMD has a rich tradition of supporting both open standards and open source,” said Andrej Zdravkovic, Corporate Vice President for Software. “Today, I’m very excited to see our relaunched GPUOpen website, which marks AMD’s continued commitment to openness and the enablement of innovation. Whether its fantastic developer tools, vibrant graphical effects, or our easy-to-use SDKs; GPUOpen puts developers at the heart of everything we do.”