AMD is set to give a sneak peek of its next-generation image improving FidelityFX technologies at one of its upcoming sessions at the Game Developers Conference 2023 in late March, the company revealed this week.
AMD’s FidelityFX package is mostly known for the company’s Super Resolution image upscaling technology, as it is supported by a wide variety of games and can work on AMD-powered game consoles and with non-Radeon hardware, as well. But AMD’s FidelityFX is actually a large collection of eye candy enhancing technologies designed to greatly improve visual quality of games or improve their framerates without visible degradation of quality.
In addition to FSR, AMD’s current version of FidelityFX includes things like Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS), Combined Adaptive Compute Ambient Occlusion (CACAO), Variable Rate Shading (VRS), Stochastic Screen Space Reflections (SSSR) and ray-traced shadow Denoiser just to name a few. Many of AMD’s FidelityFX technologies are used by games, but none of them has managed to become as popular as Super Resolution (we assume something similar is true about Nvidia’s image enhancing technologies).
It is not completely clear what other technologies AMD plans to add to its FidelityFX collection, but Super Resolution 3.0 is certainly one of the options. Other possibilities also include various ways to improve performance of ray tracing-enabled games, but it remains to be seen what AMD could possibly do here given hardware capabilities of RDNA 2 and RDNA 3-based GPUs.
“In this session, FidelityFX SDK lead Jason Lacroix will walk you through the features and architecture of the SDK, discuss how to implement FidelityFX technology on top of your engine’s own abstractions, and look at the effects released as part of the SDK,” AMD’s description of the session reads. “This session will also include an exciting sneak peek of new FidelityFX technologies that will be available soon. ”
On a side note, AMD this month released a plugin for Unreal Engine 5.1 that enables its FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.2 technology in games that use this engine. The plugin allows developers to easily add FSR 2.2 to their games and gives them some additional control to tackle ghosting and improve appearance of things like animated foliage that tends to suffer from ghosting artifacts.