AMD has hinted that a new version of its FidelityFX Super Resolution dynamic upscaling technology could be launching in the near future, with a reveal that it will be discussing a "Next Generation Image Upscaling for Games" at the upcoming Games Developer Conference 2022. Whether this will be some sort of AI-assisted upscaling, like DLSS and XESS remains to be seen, but it's exciting to see AMD continuing its image upscaling development apace.
AMD's launch of FSR in 2021 was a big deal. It wasn't as smart or as capable as DLSS, but it works on every GPU and it does a decent enough job of improving performance that it was a great way to make games playable that don't have DLSS implementation, and for people who don't have Nvidia graphics cards.
It used a combination of edge detection upscaling to raise the perceived resolution of an image, applied anti-aliasing to it, and then performed a sharpening pass to improve the clarity. It's not perfect, and in its heavier handed modes, it gets a little sparkly from overhsarpning, but the effect was noticeable on frame rate, and in higher quality modes, barely discernible from the actual native resolution scaling.
FSR 2.0 should be better, in whatever guise it comes in. If AMD can merely improve the sharpening so that it's less obvious and prone to artifacts, that'd almost be enough, but if it can also bring in some of the frame to frame data to Nvidia uses for its DLSS, then FSR 2.0 could be very exciting indeed. Especially if it continues to work on every GPU.
Look out for more details ahead of GDC 2022 on March 23.
