AMD Unveils Radeon Super Resolution, Brings Performance Improvements to Thousands of Games

AMD today introduced Radeon Super Resolution (RSR), a new performance enhancement feature that’s designed to improve frame-rates of thousands of games, whether or not they feature support for it. Put simply, RSR is a high-quality upscaling algorithm derived from FidelityFX Super Resolution 1.0, which is located on the driver-side, rather than game-side. In games that support FSR, the 3D scene rendered at a lower resolution is put through the FSR upscaler algorithm before post-processing and HUD are applied to its result. RSR doesn’t require game-level integration, because it requires the game to simply run at a lower resolution than the display’s native resolution; so it could act like a high-quality image upscaling algorithm.

This means that thousands of games can benefit from RSR, as the feature is agnostic to what it’s upscaling. There are a couple of wrinkles, though. First, you’ll need a Radeon RX 5000 or RX 6000 series GPU, based on the RDNA or RDNA2 graphics architectures. The older “Vega” or “Polaris” architectures don’t support it. “Vega” is still a current architecture, given that Ryzen 5000 series processors with Radeon Graphics, use a “Vega” based iGPU. The feature should, however, work with the RDNA2-based iGPU of the Ryzen 6000 “Rembrandt” processor. The second big catch is that since RSR comes later down the rendering pipeline than even HUD application, you may notice low-quality HUDs in some games—especially RTS or RPGs with large cluttered HUDs and inventory icons. RSR is being released through the AMD Software 22.3.1 update today.

We explored RSR in greater technical detail, and tested its performance and image quality for you in our Radeon Super Resolution article.