AMD's FSR has received a positive response across 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 it is to implement within games
though it looks like people digging through the
source code
have found out that the tech behind FSR might be a little too similar 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) technology is based on the Lanczos upscale, albeit, a modified version of it. The FSR algorithm is actually composed of two main passes, EASU (Edge-Adaptive Spatial Upsampling) and RCAS (Robust Contrast-Adaptive Sharpening). The EASU pass provides spatial only scaling at a relatively low cost & which makes it appropriate for lower-end GPUs on desktops and laptops.
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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 as ringing, by using the nearest 2x2 input texels or 2-tap approximation.
Battaglia further states that this technology has been offered within NVIDIA's 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 taps than FSR for higher quality. This works on older Turing & Pascal GPUs & can be applied globally to all DirectX 9, 10, 11, 12, Vulkan, and OpenGL games.
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Now it's not the most efficient way of upscaling games as there 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.
Also, since this upscaling method works for the entire screen, there is a possibility of the game UI or Menu 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 be 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 applicable for general purpose use as Jarred Walton over at
TomsHardware
points out.
It is also pretty clear that AMD's FSR will be a superior technology 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 card from the past two years including the GeForce 10 and 16 series products. But this is only useful for the AAA gaming titles that don't have
FSR or DLSS
support in which case, Lanczos filter through the NVIDIA control panel is a good option.
News Source:
Tomshardware
