AMD FSR antialiasing discussion

[trinibwoy]

Because there are developers who don't ever want to implement any temporal sampling ...

TAA is only common in console centric AAA games. Many small developers don't ever implement TAA. Anno 1800 is an FSR supported game that doesn't even have TAA either. Godot will never have any temporal sampling techniques because of the lead developer's distaste for it's implementation cost. Why deny the advantage of implementation simplicity when some developers feel that it's very much real to them ?

Fair enough. I’m sure you can find niche use cases for it but that’s not really an argument in its favor. Most indie games don’t need any upscaling at all and run just fine at native res.

What DF did by comparing FSR to one of the state of the art temporal upsamplers was somewhat disingenuous since Epic Games have dozens of engineers to optimize the quality of their technique when a lot of studios don't even come close with their own existing TAA solutions ...

Isn’t FSR a state of the art spatial upscaler? Seems like a fair comparison.

 

[troyan]

Most Indie studios are using UE or Unity which have TAA included. For example KeokeN Interactive has updated "Deliver us the Moon" to the latest UE4 version with TAAU support. Going forward TAAU will be the standard upscaling technique in most UE4 games.

 

[OlegSH]

Isn’t FSR a state of the art spatial upscaler?

It looks good, but the difference with your usual Lancos is not earth shattering and comes down just to slightly better geometry edges when textures are mostly the same or even slightly worse - https://imgsli.com/NTg1NTI/3/1

 

[DegustatoR]

Because there are developers who don't ever want to implement any temporal sampling ...

Really? Why is that? And which games don't have TAA these days? Can you name some?

 

[Lurkmass]

Isn’t FSR a state of the art spatial upscaler? Seems like a fair comparison.

I'd be surprised if AMD spent more than 5 engineers on several months for what was essentially a toy project like FSR ...

FSR might be state of the art in it's own category but less than ideal TAA implementations still outweigh the good TAA implementations so comparing FSR to one of the best temporal sampling implementations is arguably distorting the reality at large ...

 

[Rootax]

I'd be surprised if AMD spent more than 5 engineers on several months for what was essentially a toy project like FSR ...

FSR might be state of the art in it's own category but less than ideal TAA implementations still outweigh the good TAA implementations so comparing FSR to one of the best temporal sampling implementations is arguably distorting the reality at large ...

But if the goal was to generate attention, mission accomplished. And the usuals suspects youtubers are claiming nVidia has to respond, etc... Pretty well oiled machine....

 

[trinibwoy]

https://www.pcgameshardware.de/commoncfm/comparison/clickSwitch.cfm?id=164183
in terminator fsr gives better results than taau

Just got to techpowerup's review. Their sliders are really helpful! What's weird is their observations.

AMD FSR FidelityFX Super Resolution Quality & Performance Review - Terminator Resistance | TechPowerUp

In their side by side for Terminator native is definitely blurrier than FSR ultra. This is likely due to the sharpening that FSR applies. However, they mention nothing about the lower detail and aliasing in the FSR shot. It's really obvious in the puddle reflection, the chain link fence and the bushes at mid distance.

Kingshunt also looks much better with FSR than native. And there's no loss of detail with FSR because there isn't high frequency detail to begin with. Some of these games are really benefiting from a little sharpening.

 

[PSman1700]

I'd be surprised if AMD spent more than 5 engineers on several months for what was essentially a toy project like FSR ...

FSR might be state of the art in it's own category but less than ideal TAA implementations still outweigh the good TAA implementations so comparing FSR to one of the best temporal sampling implementations is arguably distorting the reality at large ...

Like others have mentioned, seems more a marketing thing (FSR). TAA/U aint that far off from what tsr is doing. Its no DLSS competitor and i doubt it ever was thought to be one either on AMD's side.

On pc this wont be much of a thing, maybe on consoles TSR could have a future, but even there i dont think its all that of an advancement over whats already there.

 

[MfA]

Going forward TAAU will be the standard upscaling technique in most UE4 games.

For console sure. For PC? I'm pessisimistic about that.

 

[PSman1700]

For console sure. For PC? I'm pessisimistic about that.

Couldnt resist

 

[troyan]

Did a comparision in "Deliver us the Moon" between 1440p and 1440@50% TAAU (equal to FSR Performance): https://imgsli.com/NTg1Nzg
Compare this to FSR Performance in Godfall: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/...solution-quality-performance-benchmark/5.html

 

[trinibwoy]

Did a comparision in "Deliver us the Moon" between 1440p and 1440@50% TAAU (equal to FSR Performance): https://imgsli.com/NTg1Nzg
Compare this to FSR Performance in Godfall: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/...solution-quality-performance-benchmark/5.html

It's better than FSR performance but TAAU is also struggling at upscaled 1440p. Text and specular highlights are especially suffering. Upscaling really seems to only be reasonable at 4K.

 

[MfA]

PCGH here is unfortunately wrong about Terminator Resistance's res slider using TAA Upsample. Here if you inject Unreal Engine Unlocker into the game and set the res slider below 100, you can see that TAA Upsampling is set to 0:

Is there any game which is confirmed to use TAAU by this method?

 

[troyan]

It's better than FSR performance but TAAU is also struggling at upscaled 1440p. Text and specular highlights are especially suffering. Upscaling really seems to only be reasonable at 4K.

It still upscaling from 720p. I think the result okay. Question is still which FRS preset is needed to match TAAU. Kitguru has activated it in Terminator and at with the same base resolution as FSR UQ in 4K TAAU is better:

 

[iroboto]

Really? Why is that? And which games don't have TAA these days? Can you name some?

esports games. When you have a dire need to reduce latency to zero. So any title that would use MSAA for instance as the preferred choice of antialiasing over TAA, typically (VR, etc), or forward/forward+ renderers.

AMD's entire marketing campaign is really dedicated towards that sort of gaming. Higher frame rates, lowest amount of latency and in the particular lay of land, I think this is really speaking out to mobile, esports and VR.

Forza Horizon series all use MSAA IIRC. I don't believe they've added a temporal option yet.

 

[pharma]

Really? Why is that? And which games don't have TAA these days? Can you name some?

I think Nioh 2 might be one.

In the past, we've wondered whether this quality win comes down to mitigating the artefacts of temporal anti-aliasing - TAA - but the recent arrival of a DLSS upgrade to Nioh 2 provides us with an interesting test case. Nioh 2's basic rendering lacks much in the way of any form of anti-aliasing at all. It's pretty much as raw as raw can be. So the question is: can DLSS retain its performance advantage and still provide an actual increase to image quality up against native resolution rendering? Remarkably, the answer is yes.

Nvidia DLSS in Nioh 2: the most demanding challenge yet for AI upscaling? • Eurogamer.net

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Kitguru seems like the most useful video I've seen so far. It shows a side-by-side comparison in Godfall between 4K FSR Ultra and UE4's TAAU from 77% scale (i.e. same base resolution).

TAAU does indeed look sharper, but there's a lot of shimmering that can be seen in the stairs. The performance boost between 4K FSR Ultra and 77% + TAAU also seems to be practically identical (92.5 FPS on FSR Ultra vs. 89.2 TAAU+77%), so it really is a matter of preference between them.
From the example the author gave, I would prefer FSR as the shimmering and artifacts would probably bother me more than the added sharpness.
Then for 1080p FSR Ultra really can't do much, at least for larger monitors / lower pixel densities, so 77% + TAAU seems preferrable.

In Anno 1800 it seems even the Quality mode behaves quite well at 4K.


As for those interested in knowing what this brings to x86 handhelds, here's The Phawx's analysis of FSR on the Aya NEO:

He only uses Riftbreaker. By downsizing the video in my monitor to emulate a 7" panel, I can't see any difference between the native and quality modes. It's just giving away a ~35% boost for free in a high-density screen, and it's not more because the 15W Zen2 APUs are pretty starved in compute resources (especially the Aya NEO's Ryzen 5 4500U with only 6 CUs enabled).

This looks like a pretty good tech for the upcoming SteamPal.

The FSR advantage of being easier to implement in a game doesn’t seem to be that helpful given TAA is basically in everything anyway. So FSR is really only easier to add to a game that doesn’t use TAA and that’s a shrinking population.

If you're talking about TAAU, then it's just not true. I understand that some people are passing this as a fact, but the amount of PC games launched within the past ~4 years with a TAAU toggle is very small. Even Alex said many devs don't even know the option is there in UE4.
You could argue that more developers using Unreal Engine should add this option, but I don't know if easier to enable in an update than FSR which apparently needs less than a handful of hours to implement.

 

[trinibwoy]

No I meant TAA. Haven’t seen much if anything using temporal upscaling.

 

[DegustatoR]

esports games. When you have a dire need to reduce latency to zero

TAA doesn't add latency beyond whatever is the cost of TAA itself which is unlikely to be higher than that of FSR from what data we have now.

So any title that would use MSAA for instance as the preferred choice of antialiasing over TAA, typically (VR, etc), or forward/forward+ renderers.

VR I can give you but most forward(+) renderers don't do MSAA for years now opting for TAA instead. id Tech, Dunia - both use TAA for example.
With VR however I wonder how well FSR would do there considering its impact on temporal stability and aliasing.

AMD's entire marketing campaign is really dedicated towards that sort of gaming.

How is it dedicated to this? There are zero such titles in the list of FSR games provided at its launch.

Forza Horizon series all use MSAA IIRC. I don't believe they've added a temporal option yet.

True but we'll see what will happen in FH5.

I think Nioh 2 might be one.

Also true but they have added DLSS regardless showcasing that the amount of work needed to add it even to games which don't have TAA is highly overblown right now.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

No I meant TAA. Haven’t seen much if anything using temporal upscaling.

Then why is FSR only easier to implement when there's no TAA? FSR works with TAA just fine, as well as all other AA implementations.