AMD is striving to launch its answer to NVIDIA’s deep learning super sampling image upscaling technology, FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), in 2021. The time frame stems from Radeon CVP and GM Scott Herkelman, who took part in PC World’s The Full Nerd podcast today and confirmed that his team was progressing well enough with the anticipated feature to potentially release it later this year. Herkelman admitted that AMD had much more work to do in order to hit the quality target that gamers and developers are expecting, however.
“It’s progressing very well internally in our lab, but it’s our commitment to the gaming community that it needs to be open that it needs to work across all things and game developers need to adopt it,” Herkelman said in a transcript shared by VideoCardz. “Even though it’s progressing well, we still have more work to do and not only internally but with our game developer partners.”
“We want to launch it this year. We believe we can do that this year, but at the same time we a lot more work ahead of us. We need to make sure the image quality is there. We need to make sure it can scale from different resolutions. And at the same time that our game developers are happy with what we are producing.”
Herkelman goes on to suggest that AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution may not leverage machine learning as previous reports have indicated. That would make FSR a slightly different beast than NVIDIA DLSS, which uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to produce higher-quality, upscaled images.
“You don’t need machine learning to do it, you can do this many different ways and we are evaluating many different ways,” Herkelman explained. “What matters the most to us is what game developers want to use because if at the end of the day it is just for us, we force people to do it, it is not a good outcome. We would rather say: gaming community, which one of these techniques would you rather see us implement so that this way it can be immediately spread across the industry and hopefully cross-platform.”
Herkelman also contradicted a recent story suggesting that AMD was delaying FidelityFX Super Resolution until it could be supported properly on both PC and next-gen consoles. Apparently, red team has no qualms with launching FSR for the former first.