Conclusion
This has been a very quick and dirty look at how AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution FSR can improve performance in Godfall. We took AMD’s flagship GPU and compared it with NVIDIA’s flagship GPU. We put the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT directly up against the GeForce RTX 3090. We also looked at each video card individually, to see the kind of performance benefit that FSR can provide at 1440p and 4K, as well as with and without Ray Tracing in the game.
This article was focused on performance, not image quality. The goal of FSR is to improve performance. Anything that is not the native resolution will naturally be of a lower image quality with FSR.
Performance
On the AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT, as fast as the video card is, we saw performance improvements at 1440p and 4K with FSR. However, what was interesting is that at 1440p there did seem to be very diminishing returns. There seemed to be a wall that we hit with performance after Quality FSR. The biggest increase in performance was simply enabling Ultra Quality FSR. When we turned on Ray Tracing at 1440p we started to see larger differences in performance gain using FSR. There was more scaling at the lower quality options.
At 4K is where we saw the most performance gain with FSR. This continued with Ray Tracing being enabled at 4K. The most impressive improvement was from 4K with Ray Tracing turned on. It went from 55FPS to 81FPS with Ultra Quality FSR. This made the gameplay experience at 4K with Ray Tracing much smoother.
The GeForce RTX 3090 also benefited in performance by being able to use FSR in Godfall. Unlike the Radeon RX 6900 XT, we continued to see large improvements in performance at the lower quality settings of FSR at 1440p. There wasn’t much difference between Ultra Quality and Quality, but then Balanced and Performance did greatly improve performance. It improved it so much it was close to 200FPS at 1440p with Performance FSR. When we turned on Ray Tracing we continued to see a performance improvement. The performance improvement was greater with Ray Tracing turned on.
4K, like on the Radeon RX 6900 XT, proved to benefit the most from FSR. Performance was much higher at 4K using FSR. We saw a very linear graph of performance improvement as the quality decreased. When we turned on Ray Tracing this trend continued.
Between the Radeon RX 6900 XT and GeForce RTX 3090, the GeForce RTX 3090 is faster in this game. Whether you have Ray Tracing on, or off, or FSR on or off, the RTX 3090 is consistently faster. If you compare FSR to FSR, the RTX 3090 will be on top at least 10% or more.
Ray Tracing
In terms of Ray Tracing, generally speaking, this game is very light on its Ray Tracing demand compared to other games. It uses a lesser implementation of Ray Tracing compared to some games. The demand isn’t as high as we would see in a game like Cyberpunk 2077, or Metro Exodus Enhanced, for example.
The AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT drops performance by 10% enabling Ray Tracing at 1440p, and 17% at 4K. The GeForce RTX 3090 only drops performance by 7% at 1440p and 11% at 4K. The GeForce RTX 3090, therefore, is more efficient at Ray Tracing performance in the game.
Final Points
FSR is finally here, AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution is a technology that has a lot of potential. The fact that it can run on any GPU can mean it can provide a performance increase no matter what video card you have. That’s a huge bonus. FSR does need to be implemented by game developers, so it has to have game support. If AMD can promote it enough, perhaps it will be picked up more and more by developers, especially if it can be implemented easily as it is claimed.
The goal of FSR is to improve performance. It is to allow lower-end video cards to be able to run more modern games, and higher game settings, and at higher resolutions. It is to allow video cards to run games faster at 4K, and with features like Ray Tracing. It does not run at the native resolution but upsamples lower resolution. Therefore, anything that is not the native resolution will never look exactly the same. That’s not the point though, the point here is that FSR is to improve performance. In Godfall, it did exactly that.
The intent of this article was to focus on the performance aspects of FSR, and see what kind of a performance advantage potential it could bring. That said, we will leave with our opinion based on the performance experienced here, and our experience playing Godfall, to only use Ultra Quality. Anything below that does not look good. However, at Ultra Quality you get the big performance boost if you need it, and you sacrifice a little image quality in the process because it is not the original native resolution. If you know that going in, and you need the performance boost, then FSR will provide that for you.