Early last year, AMD announced its FidelityFX Super Resolution technology, which caused quite a stir in the gaming industry. It came as a godsend for PC gamers who are always looking for better performance from their games. At its core, it’s an image scaling technology aimed at improving the overall performance of your games. Earlier this year, the company also released version 2.0 of this technology with new tools for developers to take advantage of. Over 110 games are now supported by AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution and the list just keeps growing. Let’s take a deep dive into what’s on offer to understand why gamers are so excited about it.

What does AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution actually do?

For every gamer out there, performance is king, whether enjoying intense battles in God of War or navigating crazy time loops in Deathloop. But going for high settings usually means a drop in frame rates. As a result, a powerful upscaling and reconstruction has become necessary. AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution is developed using an advanced spatial scaling algorithm that delivers super-high-quality edges and distinctive pixel detail while significantly improving performance, especially when demanding effects such as ray tracing are enabled.

There are four quality modes that gamers can choose from to meet their image quality requirements. With AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution, gamers can expect an average performance increase of 2.4x when running select games at 4K. The beauty of this technology is that it is not just limited to AMD CPUs and GPUs. Multiple platforms and graphics cards can take advantage of this to display beautiful images.

How does it work?

The first step in this process is that it lowers the render resolution of the game you’re playing. This certainly improves performance, but what about the lower resolution? Well, at the same time, the engine also scales the input back to your target resolution with its own unique algorithm. This brings the super resolution output to near native resolution image quality. As you can see, the magic is in the upscaling process, which includes analysis of the source image, detection of edges, and reconstruction of the high-definition frames at the target resolution.

And these aren’t the only processes that happen in real time. To polish the final output, FidelityFX Super Resolution also applies sharpening to further enhance image quality by enhancing pixel detail. The resulting images therefore have super-high quality edges and distinctive pixel details not found in any traditional upscaling technology. At a normal viewing distance, the image quality of a game with FidelityFX Super Resolution is indistinguishable from the original image, and you also benefit from greatly improved performance.

What are the different modes of FidelityFX Super Resolution?

This AMD technology seamlessly does its job but also keeps a bit of control in your hands. There are four quality settings to choose from, depending on whether you want to achieve the best image quality with a still significant performance boost, or if you want to maintain performance above all else. The first such setting is Ultra Quality, which is adept at producing virtually indistinguishable image quality with good performance, so don’t expect really high frame rates here. The second is the quality mode, which delivers better performance along with image quality very close to native rendering.

The third mode is called Balance and as you would expect it offers the best of both worlds. The last FidelityFX Super Resolution mode you can take advantage of is Performance, which has a visible impact on picture quality but delivers the ultimate performance your hardware can handle. As you can see, each of these modes offers several performance gains along with multiple image quality options.

What it comes down to:

One of the biggest advantages of AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution is its flexible nature. It works on Ryzen processors and Radeon graphics cards, as well as Nvidia graphics cards. Not only that; it also has really low hardware requirements. The technology can run on any graphics card that supports Shader Model 5.0 or higher. And then there’s the ever-growing list of games that support it. Right now these are AAA games like God of War, Deathloop, Marvel’s Spiderman Remastered, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, Ghostwire Tokyo, Hitman 3, Microsoft Flight Simulator and many more. AMD has had a huge impact on the gaming industry lately, and FidelityFX Super Resolution is another innovation that speaks volumes about the company’s efforts in the space.