AMD will be at GDC 2022 to talk about the next generation upscaling technologies, according to what the official calendar indicates. Unfortunately there is not much additional information available – the description simply says that “AMD will present some of the results of its research. [nel campo]and how this technology can be applied to games to improve their user experience “.
Upscaling algorithms is a field that is proving to be increasingly crucial for the evolution of gaming. Display resolutions are constantly increasing and even the most powerful cards currently struggle to keep up, especially due to the increasingly widespread diffusion of monitors with very high refresh rates. The concept is somewhat simple: the card renders the game at a lower resolution than desired, then the video stream is somewhat enlarged to the native resolution. In this way the GPU has to do fewer calculations for each single frame, and thus in the same period of time it can complete more: in other words, the frame rate increases.
Upscaling is not a remotely new idea, and has always been associated with inevitable loss of zoomed image quality compared to the original. However, in the last period, especially thanks to the so-called artificial intelligence (more correct to use the expression machine learning), surprising results can be obtained. NVIDIA, with its DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling), was a pioneer: the technology, which exploits the machine learning cores of the latest RTX video cards, returns results in many cases indistinguishable from the game in native resolution, guaranteeing time same as the leaps forward in gigantic frame rates.
AMD responded with the current FSR, or FidelityFX Super Resolution, which is technically and philosophically quite different though. It basically consists of a very sophisticated open-source algorithm, but that does not use machine learning; the advantage is that no dedicated chips are needed and therefore compatibility is practically universal, the disadvantage is that it does not have the same performance as DLSS.
It has long been rumored that AMD is preparing a technology that can rival that of NVIDIA on equal terms, and the GDC, one of the most important events of the year (if not THE most important) for video game developers, seems to be the ideal opportunity to talk about it. The current Radeon RX 6000 do not have an AI core, but according to various rumors they should arrive in the next generation cards. GDC 2022 will be held from Monday 21 March to Friday 25; the AMD session will be on a Wednesday and will last a full hour.
