AMD has added its image sharpening feature, previously an exclusive for the RX 5000 and RX 500 series graphics cards, to its Vega range of GPUs -- that includes the Vega 56, the Vega 64, and the much-maligned, but still supremely powerful, Radeon VII. This update comes as part of the new driver released, Radeon Adrenalin 19.9.2, which also introduces fixes for Sekrio: Shadows Die Twice, and improved support for Tom Clancy's Ghost Record Breakpoint.
Image sharpening is a fun feature AMD added to its RX 5700 product line when it debuted in July 2019. It uprates the quality of certain textures to remove motion blur and to counteract the effects of overzealous anti-aliasing. Better yet, it does it without any real overhead. Think the sharpening effects you've seen in graphics packs like Reshade or SweetFX, but and official AMD implementation.
Previously this was an exclusive for DX9, DX12, and Vulkan games on the RX 5700 and RX 5700XT, but it's since been expanded to DX12 and Vulkan games on RX 500 cards, and now the same with the Vega 56 and 64. Unfortunately, this support doesn't extend to Vega 8 and Vega 11 APUs where image sharpening could have a greater impact. Those APUs will typically run games at lower detail levels and resolutions, so sharpening on them would be much appreciated.
Hopefully AMD adds support to them in the future.
To download the latest AMD driver, head to the Radeon driver page.
