AMD FSR 3.1 Announced With Vulkan Support

[hartree]

Both XeSS and DLSS are AI based solutions, while FSR probably uses classic algorithms. From my experience, no upscaling algorithm can match AI based ones, so worse FSR quality is to be expected. It may never be fixed, and I've heard that AMD is working on AI upscaler too.
But on the other hand, it's faster and supports more cards.

Thankfully Intel also implemented XeSS using DP4A instructions, and this is as good AI upscaler as RDNA2 can handle.
And it's not that much slower, while providing clearly superior IQ than FSR. Even if version using tensor cores on Arc is even better.
So now we have choice.

I think that's a good point, there's a lot of criticism of FSR, but effectively it wouldn't help users much if AMD invested a lot of effort into developing something like XeSS for their current GPUs. I wonder what Intel's roadmap for the DP4A path is and if they'll open-source it.
Microsoft has an interest to stay competitive with Sony's PSSR of course, but who knows if they're willing to invest.

[skeevy420]

Great news. I like the uncoupling of the upscaler and frame generator. That's useful if you're pushing 1440p96 on a 144hz monitor. I also hope the new FFX API works out for them and us in regards to games getting FSR updates faster.

I saw that AMD had a customer survey going so I left them this in the notes at the end:

My main motivator for choosing to purchase a Radeon graphics card over the competition was when AMD announced AMDGPU and my motivator is still AMDGPU. AMD's open source drivers being easy to use has been my main motivator for purchasing 3 different Radeon graphics cards over the past 10 years. While I like the driver, it's the software that's the problem. That's especially true on Linux. If I could have given half a check for that choice, I would have.

AMD's software stack (AMDGPU-Pro, ROCm, AOCL, AOCC, etc) being licensed in a way that distributions can't package or only having support for Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu while NVIDIA and Intel support any Linux distribution that meets their software's minimum requirements is making me consider other alternatives because AMD's software availability and lack of support with consumer/gaming GPUs makes it hard to dabble with GPU computing. So much of the world is CUDA-only that being a loyal AMD customer is making me feel left behind.

Please consider making your Linux software available to any distribution that meets the minimum requirements. Please changing the licenses enough so things like AOCC and AOCL can be downloaded from a distribution's repositories. Please consider making your software as easy to use as NVIDIA's and Intel's so FOSS projects and close source software alike can support, or have better support, for ROCm/HIP/OpenCL for AMD products.

[aufkrawall]

Both XeSS and DLSS are AI based solutions, while FSR probably uses classic algorithms. From my experience, no upscaling algorithm can match AI based ones, so worse FSR quality is to be expected.

Really depends on the image area and how you weigh artifacts. Where enough temporal history data is available, hand-tuned algorithms can outshine DL stuff. But they break way stronger when it's not available, which also affects some elements like particle sprites, animated textures etc. stronger. But FSR 2/3.0 upsampling really isn't the best case for non-DL, recent Unreal Engine 5's TSR looks way better (is more expensive though, at least at epic setting). So hopefully FSR 3.1 can catch up to that. Would already be great if it were similarly fast at comparable image quality (including Nanite geometry, which current FSR 2/3.0 can't handle well at all).

[Anux]

While I'm critical to any upscaling technology it's probably needed to drive 4K displays with low end GPUs and also extends the live of older GPUs.

I think that's a good point, there's a lot of criticism of FSR, but effectively it wouldn't help users much if AMD invested a lot of effort into developing something like XeSS for their current GPUs.

Agreed, FSR is currently the only widely supported upscaler that runs on any GPU with programmable shaders. It looks like AMD will come up with it's own AI upscaler in the 8000 or 9000 radeons but hopefully they don't stop improving FSR afterwards.

[aufkrawall]

Agreed, FSR is currently the only widely supported upscaler that runs on any GPU with programmable shaders. It looks like AMD will come up with it's own AI upscaler in the 8000 or 9000 radeons but hopefully they don't stop improving FSR afterwards.

My hope would be that they complement hand-crafted algorithms with machine learning to combine the best of two worlds in an efficient manner (if that's possible).

[rob-tech]

I like this technology, even the older FSR 2.X as it allows very recent titles such as EA Sports WRC to run on Ultra settings (min 60 fps) with no perceptible quality loss (looks even better due to the slight sharpening) when set to the Quality preset on my aging 5700 XT. It looks like this is an impressive step forward and the only thing that remains poor on AMD cards is the ray tracing performance, however, this partially swings my upgrade preference towards flagship RDNA 4 rather than the RTX 5080 to replace my 5700 XT in the 5950x system, especially as it will have probably the same VRAM and be priced more affordably.

[Anux]

I like this technology, even the older FSR 2.X as it allows very recent titles such as EA Sports WRC to run on Ultra settings (min 60 fps) with no perceptible quality loss (looks even better due to the slight sharpening)

I'm using FSR2 with baldurs gate on a 5700G iGPU but the quality loss is very perceptible, aliasing and flickering are the main problems, It's ok because it allows you to run it but its far from nice.

[rob-tech]

I'm using FSR2 with baldurs gate on a 5700G iGPU but the quality loss is very perceptible, aliasing and flickering are the main problems, It's ok because it allows you to run it but its far from nice.

If the input resolution is not at least 1080p and you don't use the quality preset for FSR with sufficiently high game settings then of course it looks bad. The feature is not meant to allow a potato to run the latest games perfectly, it's meant to grant a subtle performance headroom so you can achieve for instance a minimum of 60 fps on titles that dip below the target sometimes.

[binarybanana]

I'm using FSR2 with baldurs gate on a 5700G iGPU but the quality loss is very perceptible, aliasing and flickering are the main problems, It's ok because it allows you to run it but its far from nice.

BG3 has problems with certain effects, most notably character outlines seem to not go through the upscaling pipeline as they should. Other than that FSR2 is quite impressive.

[Anux]

... Other than that FSR2 is quite impressive.

There are much more games that have problems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbJYtixMUgI impressive is certainly not the word I would use, maybe "still useful".