Ray tracing was new to AMD GPUs in their latest AMD RX 6000, but despite this, they are inferior to NVIDIA in terms of performance in several of the games that use ray tracing to improve their graphics. This is a reason not to buy graphics from AMD instead of NVIDIA. AMD intends to turn the situation around with its AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution or better known as AMD FSR.
AMD recognizes the superiority of the NVIDIA RTX 30
In an interview for a Twitch channel, Scott Herkelman, head of the Radeon Technology Group, ended up acknowledging the superiority of NVIDIA GPUs in terms of Ray Tracing in the PC World Full Nerd podcast with the following words:
We lack performance (compared to NVIDIA) (for Ray Tracing), but with FSR we hope to keep pace.
Which shouldn’t surprise us, because at the limits of AMD’s implementation we have to add the inability to run an equivalent to NVIDIA’s DLSS, which increases its downside. This in AMD led them to develop the FSR to be able to reduce distances with NVIDIA.
AMD acknowledges the superiority of NVIDIA is not something that should surprise us, since the performance tests that have been carried out in recent months and the analyzes of the various media draw a concrete reality, and they gain nothing by denying it. But that’s bad for them because they have a much lower market share than NVIDIA in games and performance is important when choosing a GPU if you’re a fan.
From AMD’s graphics division, they had long sought to do a Judo move that would put them in a comfortable position in the GPU market, thereby gaining market share. Therefore, a graphics architecture that performs the same effect as AMD Zen at Intel but with NVIDIA is required. In addition, we must add the entry of Intel, which will offer complete kits to PC assemblers and manufacturers of their CPUs and GPUs, negatively affecting AMD.
FSR, EL Anti-DLSS Sin Deep Learning
The solution with which AMD aims to solve its disadvantage compared to NVIDIA cards is the super resolution AMD FidelityFX or also known as FSR. Of which it is said that we could have its implementation in games for June of this year, the most secure that has been implemented in a new version of the pilot.
What are the rumors saying? In the first place, it will not be necessary to form the sets and the tensor units are not necessary for the implementation of a convolutional network, which means that it is not a solution based on Deep Learning. This makes perfect sense around the world when you consider that AMD lags far behind when it comes to artificial intelligence, as it’s an area that, unlike NVIDIA, hasn’t grown much.
The solution is already in the hands of developers to implement it in games, with this solution AMD would try to reduce the distance with NVIDIA. The problems? It is a solution that uses Microsoft’s DirectML libraries, so NVIDIA can also benefit from it. We must also add how 4A Games decided not to apply this technique to improve the performance of Metro Exodus Enhaced Edition in its version for AMD Radeon, which may indicate that the FSR in its first version is rather a desperate patch.
What do we really think about the AMD FSR?
AMD has yet to reveal the solution, but we believe it is an implementation of Checkerboard Rendering, a resolution scaling technique that relies on rendering the alternate pixels of an image. to the other. It works as follows:
- A buffer ID is created during the rasterization phase of the 3D pipeline, but using the colored ROPS to do this, the buffer gives a label (ID) to each object on the screen.
- Thanks to the information contained in the identification buffer, it is possible to know where each object is located in the previous image and in particular each of its pixels.
- The information from the previous image is used to fill the pixels of the current image, so on, the missing pixels are alternated and distributed in a checkerboard matrix.
Using this technique, it is possible to halve the number of pixels which, like with DLSS, are rendered at a lower resolution. Which speeds up the functioning of the games. This technique is not new and has been used extensively on consoles to achieve 4K resolution graphics in many games.
It is a proven solution, requiring almost no effort, no training in artificial intelligence. This is why we believe that the AMD FSR can be the checkerboard rendering, as it meets all the requirements and is an already proven technology that does not require efforts from video game developers and that they already know.
