AMD FSR Based on Modified Lanczos Upscaler, Can Be Enabled On NVIDIA GPUs Using Control Panel For Similar Results In Games

AMD's FSR has received a positive response beyond the gaming and tech community for bringing an open-source solution that rivals NVIDIA and is hardware agnostic (in a way). AMD FSR runs on both, NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon GPUs and several developers have shown just how easy information technology is to implement within games though it looks like people earthworks through the source lawmaking have plant out that the tech behind FSR might exist a piffling as well like to something that NVIDIA has offered in its control panel for a while now.

AMD FSR Might Be A Little Too Similar To NVIDIA's Lanczos Upscaler As Revealed Through Source Code, NVIDIA GPUs Have Had Tech Since A While Now & Can Be Enabled In All Games

As discovered by Alexander Battaglia of Digital Foundry, the AMD FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) engineering science is based on the Lanczos upscale, albeit, a modified version of it. The FSR algorithm is really equanimous of two main passes, EASU (Edge-Adaptive Spatial Upsampling) and RCAS (Robust Contrast-Adaptive Sharpening). The EASU pass provides spatial but scaling at a relatively low cost & which makes it advisable for lower-terminate GPUs on desktops and laptops.

You may desire to read the FSR documentation, 2 tap Lanczos is the spatial upscaler. pic.twitter.com/gAEika6zma

— Alexander Battaglia (@Dachsjaeger) Baronial four, 2021

It is mentioned within the Open Source code and FSR presentation that the EASU scalar uses a modified fast approximation method to the standard Lanczos (size=2) kernel. The modified FSR version of the Lanczos filter also eliminates negative lobes, otherwise known equally ringing, past using the nearest 2x2 input texels or ii-tap approximation.

At the heart of FSR is a cut-border algorithm that detects and recreates loftier-resolution edges from the source image. Those high-resolution edges are a critical element required for turning the current frame into a "super resolution" image.

FSR provides consistent upscaling quality regardless of whether the frame is in movement, which can provide quality advantages compared to other types of upscalers.

FSR is composed of two main passes:

An upscaling pass called EASU (Edge-Adaptive Spatial Upsampling) that besides performs edge reconstruction. In this pass the input frame is analyzed and the main part of the algorithm detects gradient reversals – substantially looking at how neighboring gradients differ – from a ready of input pixels. The intensity of the slope reversals defines the weights to utilise to the reconstructed pixels at display resolution.

A sharpening pass called RCAS (Robust Dissimilarity-Adaptive Sharpening) that extracts pixel detail in the upscaled image.

Interesting. So it is a Lanczos variant after all. Prior to FSR being released, I had asked AMD virtually this (it looked Lanczos-y to me), and they said that the upscaling algorithm was "developed entirely in-house". Which doesn't seem to be entirely accurate at present...

— Ryan Smith (@RyanSmithAT) August 4, 2021

Information technology's even in the source codehttps://t.co/9MoGnp4wBl picture show.twitter.com/75weYOY9UT

— VideoCardz.com (@VideoCardz) August 4, 2021

Battaglia further states that this engineering science has been offered within NVIDIA'due south Control Panel for a couple of years now. Within the 'Manage 3D Settings' panel, users can enable GPU scaling and also control image sharpening with more than taps than FSR for higher quality. This works on older Turing & Pascal GPUs & can be applied globally to all DirectX nine, 10, eleven, 12, Vulkan, and OpenGL games.

Now information technology's not the nearly efficient way of upscaling games as at that place are certain limitations that apply to using this method compared to AMD's FSR and NVIDIA DLSS which is implemented on per-game. It has the following limitations.

Currently, the following limitations apply:

Scaling is not supported on MSHybrid systems.

HDR displays driven by pre-Turing GPUs will non support scaling

Scaling will not work with VR

Scaling will not work with displays using YUV420 format.

Scaling uses attribute ration scaling and will not employ integer scaling

Sharpening will not work with HDR displays

GPU scaling engages when games are played but in full-screen mode, and not in

windowed or borderless windowed mode.

Some G-SYNC displays have a 6-tap/64-phase scaler which scales ameliorate than that

offered by Turing'due south v-tap/32-phase scaler.

To avoid accidentally triggering scaling by applications or DWM, first change to the

desired (<native) resolution from the NVIDIA Command Console then launch the

application.

Turing's 5-tap upscaler may not engage on sure monitors, based on the monitor's

vblank timing.

Turing's five-tap upscaler may not engage if the input resolution is greater than 2560px

in either the x or y dimension.

Scaling is turned off automatically when switching display devices.

"Restore Defaults" option in the control console currently does non revert the upscaling resolution.

via NVIDIA

Also, since this upscaling method works for the entire screen, there is a possibility of the game UI or Carte du jour becoming blurry and unable to read compared to the proper solutions where devs will be knowing for sure which screen elements the upscaling needs to exist applied to and which do not. It is interesting to see that AMD chose the Lanczos Upscale as a base for its FSR tech and improved upon it in several ways while making it open-source for easier integration within AAA titles and is applicative for general purpose apply as Jarred Walton over at TomsHardware points out.

"Equally a old software programmer, I can attest to the fact that information technology's far easier to go direction to greenlight a new feature when said feature benefits 100% of the intended user base, rather than just a small portion of the potential users. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or something like that.

Of course, the proof is in the eating of the pudding, and FSR pudding tastes nigh as practiced every bit natively rendered pudding — maybe a bit undermixed, but you virtually wouldn't observe, at to the lowest degree when using the ultra quality or quality profiles. Permit's but not become too carried away with congratulating AMD on creating something new and useful when what we really should be doing is request what took and then long."

Jarred Walton - Tomshardware

It is also pretty clear that AMD's FSR will be a superior engineering science but for those who want to try it out, an interesting comparison would be to compare games that use FSR and see how NVIDIA's upscale looks against that. This is pretty much doable on any NVIDIA GeForce graphics menu from the by two years including the GeForce x and sixteen serial products. Simply this is only useful for the AAA gaming titles that don't take FSR or DLSS support in which case, Lanczos filter through the NVIDIA control panel is a skilful choice.

News Source: Tomshardware