AMD’s upscaling technology to combat NVIDIA’s DLSS dubbed FidelityFX Super Resolution or FSR has been made available in a couple of games already. Reception has been so far positive due to people’s inalienable right to believe proprietary technology is bad in the case of DLSS, but FSR isn’t the competitor to DLSS that its set out itself to be. A recent editorial from Tom’s Hardware by senior editor Jarred Walton discusses a few points about FSR and that it’s actually built on the Lanczos resampling algorithm, used in computing more than a few decades and has already been implemented by NVIDIA in their sharpening filter for nearly a decade.
Walton’s article does give AMD credit where its due and states that FSR isn’t just a straight-up Lanczos filter running in the pipe and that the company has added some optimizations to allow it to run faster along with some filtering to removes some of the halo artifacts created when applying the filter. The main ingredient that AMD has added is a unifying voice, one that calls developers together for adoption. This is what ultimately makes FSR what it is despite the tech behind it, the call to arms to unite and use a common solution.
That said, the article details that Lanczos itself can be found in use by NVIDIA in their drivers for more than a few years already and can be found in their driver software for adventurous individuals to use. It was used as a filter in NVIDIA’s case with no acceleration or promotion. NVIDIA will go on to create Deep Learning Super Sampling or DLSS which by version 2.0 has been a fairly remarkable progression of the technology and is largely better than Lanczos.
The main take here is that even if Lanczos has been in existence for a while and AMD practically rebranding the idea, game developers are given more faith by utilizing a premade solution so they don’t have to work the kinks out themselves and ultimately improve on it as well. Add to this that potentially 80% of gamers currently don’t have access to RTX cards or that can utilize DLSS, there is a far greater number of users out there that can take advantage of this technology.
Walton closes his article by pondering if Microsoft or Khronos promoted Lanczos upscaling in their API, perhaps introducing upscaling technology way back 5 to 10 years ago. It would’ve possibly allowed gamers to enjoy their cards longer which would’ve been against AMD’s and NVIDIA’s bottomline.
Speaking for myself, I do use render scaling much more than FSR and DLSS even when present, lowering the resolution isn’t a sin that the PC Master Race propaganda machine makes it out to be. Just because your monitor is is 1080p doesn’t mean all your game should run at this resolution all the time. So until you can get that shiny new card and your current one doesn’t hit a wall after lowering resolutions, you can go on to play games for a bit longer.
