Unreal Engine 5 is now available in early access mode, which means game developers can now start testing the new engine and with it their next-gen games for PC and consoles; In this regard, we see increasingly realistic graphics (even photorealistic in some cases) and which obviously need special techniques in order to be able to run at a frame rate per second that allows a good gaming experience, and this is where technologies such as TSR.
What is Super Temporal Resolution and how does it work?
In addition to other new technologies incorporated into Unreal Engine 5, Epic also announced that it has developed a new scaling technique called Temporal Super Resolution for Unreal Engine 5 based applications. This technology has a single purpose, which doesn’t is other than increasing performance by scaling up lower resolution images while preserving as much detail as possible. Does this goal sound familiar to you? It is indeed like NVIDIA DLSS
While Epic hasn’t mentioned collaborating with any company for this, AMD has done so in an official blog post that provides an overview of the changes coming with this new engine. They make it clear that Temporal Super Resolution has nothing to do with FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) that AMD is developing as a competitor to NVIDIA DLSS, and that in fact, it is highly likely that AMD will announce this technology very soon. .
Unfortunately, Epic doesn’t go into detail on how TSR works, but it appears to be quite similar to AMD Radeon Boost, which dynamically changes the resolution of the rendered images according to the movement, and for this reason it is called “Temporal”. The company behind the engine claims that an enhanced 1080p image at 4K resolution can be displayed at 43 FPS; the same scene but rendered at native 4K resolution would be 18.6 FPS, so we’re definitely talking about a considerable performance improvement.
In any case, if this is as expected, what super temporal resolution would do is dynamically detect frames or parts thereof that are repeated in two consecutive frames, so that those frames or parts are rendered at lower resolution to save resources when system, no more, no less.
Unreal Engine 5 works with all Shader Model 5 GPUs including AMD, Intel and NVIDIA graphics cards and even next-gen consoles as they are equipped with AMD RDNA 2 GPUs. It should be noted, however, that NVIDIA has Also announced that DLSS is available with this Unreal Engine 5 Early Access for easier integration, so developers will likely have a choice.
The improvements that this technology promises
We’ve already mentioned before the performance jump that Epic says was calculated, which is a scandal because it represents (according to the numbers that gave) a 231% performance improvement, literally more than double. However, let’s see what Epic and AMD have to say about it, starting with the latter:
“TSR is a new technique for scaling a lower resolution image to optimize performance and visual fidelity. AMD has worked closely with Epic to optimize super temporal resolution functionality on systems powered by Radeon. TSR, a standard feature of Unreal Engine 5, is enabled for all GPUs and provides next-generation scaling not only on PC, but also on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X / S. “
Basically what AMD is telling us is that this technology improves performance, confirms the optimization of its graphics cards, and also confirms compatibility with next-gen PCs and consoles. For its part, here’s what Epic commented on about it:
“The geometry of the Nanite micro-polygon and the fidelity requirements of the next generation of games have increased the amount of detail shown on screen like never before; To meet these demands, we wrote a super temporal resolution algorithm from Cedar to replace TemporalAA which we used in Unreal Engine 4 for high end platforms.
Temporal Super Resolution has the following properties (as published by Epic):
- Output close to the quality of native 4K renderings but with input resolutions as low as 1080p, allowing higher frame rates and better rendering fidelity.
- Less ghosting on high frequency backgrounds.
- Reduced flicker in high complexity geometry.
- Works on any Shader Model 5 compatible hardware: D3D11, D3D12, Vulkan, PS5, XSX. Soon there will be more.
- Shaders specially optimized for the PS5 and XSX GPU architecture.
How is it different from NVIDIA DLSS technology?
Essentially, it is not yet known; NVIDIA DLSS uses technology based on DNN (Deep Neural Network) that uses Artificial Intelligence to improve the image (its sharpness, in particular) and improve performance by rendering images at a resolution lower than that. of the sample, then resize them.
Basically, Temporal Super Resolution is something very similar as explained by Epic, but it remains to be seen how that will be achieved in the last resort since they haven’t talked about Artificial Intelligence or something similar yet, a fact that sets him apart. from NVIDIA DLSS already that this technology takes advantage of the specific hardware of GPUs of those in green, something that AMD GPUs or next-gen consoles do not have.
