Amd Graphics Cards Could Get A Free Speed Boost

Congratulations, Radeon graphics card owners. About (and perchance
all) of your PC games are about to run a
whole lot faster
now that the latest almanac edition of AMD’s Adrenalin Edition software is here. The flagship feature is the debut of Radeon Super Resolution, first teased at CES in January, a new skill that brings the backbone of the company’s FidelityFX Super Resolution upscaling applied science to thousands of games, not just the eighty or so titles that take appear formal FSR support.

Just as intriguingly, AMD is also teasing the next-gen FSR 2.0, with new software tricks that more mirror what Nvidia and Intel are trying to achieve with their rival upscaling technologies. In that location are some key differences, though. And at that place are a host of other improvements lurking within Adrenalin, from technical tweaks that drastically reduce the size of downloaded drivers to the ability to play games with your pals, regardless of the rigs they’re running. Let’south dig in.

Radeon Super Resolution

Radeon Super Resolution is the star of the show, of grade. Both AMD’due south FSR and Nvidia’s rival DLSS require game developers to integrate the upscaling technologies into their games before gamers tin can accept reward of their potential performance benefits. Radeon Super Resolution basically lets Radeon owners flip on that upscaling at a driver level, bringing FSR-like goodness to hundreds and thousands of games.

Let’southward take a quick step back. RSR, like FSR, lets a graphics carte du jour internally render games at a lower resolution, then performs software tricks to upscale that prototype to the higher chosen resolution of your monitor. Because your GPU is rendering a game at, say, 1080p or 1440p resolution before upscaling it to the much more strenuous 4K resolution, y’all’ll run across a big operation boost. It can potentially make previously unplayable games playable on your GPU, and greatly increasing the responsiveness of the games you’re playing.

Flipping Radeon Super Resolution on couldn’t be easier. Merely caput into the Gaming > Graphics tab in AMD Adrenalin Edition and enable RSR to turn information technology on globally if desired, or head into the per-game options to but enable it with select titles. The offset time you practice, a magician will appear that explains how to use it.

Basically, you but demand to swoop into the settings menu of a game with RSR active and select a lower resolution
with the same aspect ratio of your monitor
in its graphics settings. If you activate Radeon Super Resolution on a 4K monitor, for example, selecting either 1800p, 1440p, or 1080p every bit the in-game resolution will tell the game to render internally at that lower resolution, increasing operation, but the final image volition return at full 4K with an assistance from RSR’south upscaling magic. The lower y’all become resolution-wise, the faster your functioning will exist, simply it could also innovate more visual irregularities, like blurriness.

You’ll need to play around a trivial bit to figure out a resolution that looks good by your eye while yet providing a solid speed boost. Keith May took a deeper look at Radeon Super Resolution for PCWorld’s YouTube aqueduct in the video posted above. He shows the speed gains and image quality impact of using RSR at a variety of resolutions in several games, and then yous can run into its chops with your own eyes. Spoiler alert: He found that using Radeon Super Resolution to upscale games from 1440p to 4K provided a noticeable operation uplift with very little touch on the image quality of games while in motion.

Being able to turn Radeon Super Resolution on in thousands of games across your entire library is a benefit that can’t be understated. Flipping it on to get faster functioning in strenuous games could allow you bump upward epitome quality, activate strenuous ray tracing effects, or hitting the hallowed 60fps gold standard in games where it wasn’t possible before.

At that place are some caveats. This initial release of Radeon Super Resolution is limited to desktop Radeon RX 5000- and RX 6000-series graphics cards—older models or laptop GPUs aren’t nonetheless supported, though AMD aims to roll out compatibility for Ryzen 6000 laptop processors with integrated Radeon graphics side by side quarter. You lot’ll also demand to set your games to exclusive full screen fashion, though if a game only offers borderless full screen mode, y’all can get around information technology by changing your desktop resolution in Windows settings to one notch lower than your monitor’due south native resolution. That will kick RSR into action.

Finally, if a game offers native FidelityFX Super Resolution support, stick to that over this driver-level RSR tool. As we explained in our original coverage:

“FSR works its magic midway through the rendering process, and then it handles all its upscaling and sharpeningbeforevisual extras like moving picture grain, chromatic aberration, and the game’s heads-up brandish go added in. That keeps those elements looking equally the developers intended. Since Radeon Super Resolution kicks in at the very end of the graphics rendering pipeline, that’due south no longer the case. That tweakcouldmean that the heads-up display and other text could current of air up looking slightly off in some cases.”

Speaking of FSR…

FidelityFX Super Resolution ii.0

It isn’t part of the Adrenalin Edition upgrade, but AMD also took the fourth dimension to tease the next generation of FidelityFX Super Resolution to the press.

The first iteration of FSR launched last summer and rapidly get the fastest adopted software engineering in AMD’s history, the company claims, cheers to its vendor-doubter hardware support (aye, it runs on Nvidia GPUs too) and easy inclusion in games. It’south a simpler technology than the upscaling deployed by rivals similar Nvidia DLSS, Unreal Engine 5, and Intel’s upcoming XeSS however, relying on spatial upscaling of a rendered frame alone. Those rivals use temporal motion vectors beyond several frames to lessen the potential visual impact of upscaling. FidelityFX 2.0 volition as well. Good!

AMD didn’t divulge too many technical details, proverb only that the final picture looks better than FSR one.0 and like or better than native prototype quality. But crucially, unlike DLSS and XeSS, FSR 2.0
won’t
require dedicated automobile learning hardware (such as the tensor cores found in GeForce RTX GPUs). Instead, it should run on traditional graphics cards, including ones from AMD, Nvidia, and Intel alike, but similar the first-gen FSR.

That’s mighty intriguing stuff indeed. AMD plans to release more than technical details during its “Next-generation image upscaling for games” presentation at the Game Developers Briefing on March 23. We’re
very
keen to hear more.

A shot of Adrenalin

The balance of Adrenalin’s improvements don’t take the star power of Radeon Super Resolution, but AMD’due south software is getting some quality-of-life upgrades that look very welcome indeed.

It starts with the downloads themselves. If you use Adrenalin to update your Radeon drivers (as yous should be), the software will at present compare your installed version against what’s new, so install only the bits and blobs that have changed. That should mean faster downloads with much smaller file sizes, a flat-out
wonderful
comeback in an era when every GPU driver clocks in around 500GB in size. Windows itself recently changed to a like process and information technology’due south resulted in much less overhead.

Another key change? The AMD Link characteristic that lets you lot play games with your friends in Steam Remote Play-like fashion now works with any PC. You nonetheless need a Radeon-based organisation to kick information technology off, of course—it’s nonetheless an AMD driver feature—simply now the share links will work on systems with Nvidia and Intel inside, besides. The tool only worked on AMD-based system in the past, which was a gnarly and frustrating drawback to an otherwise compelling feature.

Adrenalin volition as well now pop up a toast notification when you launch a game, showing which Radeon technologies are active or disabled, and now you can use the fantastic Radeon Image Sharpening tool to crisp up your media, office, and web apps as well—not only games.

All in all, while this annual iteration doesn’t pack in quite as many new features as some prior Adrenalin updates, that speaks to just how far AMD has come in its software efforts over the last several years. Radeon drivers used to be notoriously flakey, but through tireless try and a serious commitment to listening to its customs in contempo times, AMD Software is at present just as polished and compelling as Nvidia’s rival GeForce Experience—better, in many ways. And Radeon Super Resolution is a seriously powerful new tool in AMD’south arsenal, ane that tin instantly speed upwards your Radeon GPU in an era where new graphics cards are a terrible brunt to try to notice. Rock on.