AMD's epic new FSR 2.0 upscaling just took a big step toward wider use

AMD Radeon RX 6600 graphics card on colourful background.

(Image credit: Future)

AMD just announced that the company's FidelityFX Super Resolution version v2.0.1 is available to developers to use in their upcoming games. The GPU Open blog post outlines AMD's newest evolution of its temporal upscaling tech, goes deep into the integration method, and gives the rundown on support.

Similar to Nvidia's AI-powered upscaling tech (DLSS), AMD's tech renders games at a lower resolution than the display, which improves performance, and then attempts to upscale the image without losing quality. It can really make a difference, too. Way back at its initial release, we saw FidelityFX Super Resolution work flawlessly, and the upscaling tool has only been improving since then.

FSR 2.0, which we've proven can look better than native 4K in Deathloop, comes with support for Vulkan and DirectX 12 right now. Soon devs will also be rolling out support for "Unreal Engine 4.26/4.27 and Unreal Engine 5 as a plugin from the Unreal Marketplace."

FSR 2.0 is tuned to run faster on RDNA 2-powered graphics cards, but it does work on Nvidia GPUs, too, so you can still get some level of benefit from FSR even if you're with the green team.

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Back in March, Nvidia also introduced an open-source framework to make it easier for developers to plug AMD or Intel's upscaling algorithms into their games' rendering pipelines.

The announcement notes that, since both FSR 1 and FSR 2 have their own unique characteristics that work better in different gameplay scenarios, "FSR 1 can still be exposed as its own upscaling option in addition to FSR 2 in game titles."

That means devs can give players the option to pick between FSR versions in-game, like in Deathloop. AMD's FSR Github page provides guidelines for developers to implement this the upscaling tech.

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Screw sports, Katie would rather watch Intel, AMD and Nvidia go at it. Having been obsessed with computers and graphics for three long decades, she took Game Art and Design up to Masters level at uni, and has been rambling about games, tech and science—rather sarcastically—for four years since. She can be found admiring technological advancements, scrambling for scintillating Raspberry Pi projects, preaching cybersecurity awareness, sighing over semiconductors, and gawping at the latest GPU upgrades. Right now she's waiting patiently for her chance to upload her consciousness into the cloud.