Question AMD's answer to DLSS, FFSS. Mentioned in [GraphicallyChallenged][YT].

[VirtualLarry]

Sorry, no need to watch the video, basically just stating that FFSS (FX Super-sampling) is coming to AMD, to combat NVidias's DLSS.

 

[Stuka87]

Could you, I don't know, maybe type something in your post so we don't have to click and give views to some video for one little piece of info?

 

[GodisanAtheist]

I know 36 is basically ancient but *waves cane* this cancer of putting every-god-damn-thing in video format has to stop.

Even more mind blowing when so many videos are formatted for muted phones so are just text overlay on random video snippets... ITS JUST AN ARTICLE THAT I CANNOT READ AT MY OWN SPEED THAT WAS LIKELY MORE TIME CONSUMING TO ACTUALLY MAKE.

Also, get off my lawn.

 

[biostud]

If you prefer to read about it then:

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution technology may launch this spring - VideoCardz.com

 

[MrTeal]

I know 36 is basically ancient but *waves cane* this cancer of putting every-god-damn-thing in video format has to stop.

Even more mind blowing when so many videos are formatted for muted phones so are just text overlay on random video snippets... ITS JUST AN ARTICLE THAT I CANNOT READ AT MY OWN SPEED THAT WAS LIKELY MORE TIME CONSUMING TO ACTUALLY MAKE.

Also, get off my lawn.

Google how many lbs in a stone.
10 minute video starting with the story of how when he was a boy, his mother used to take him to the garden and they'd walk.....

Recipes are the worst for that. Just tell me how many teaspoons of each spice for the beef roast rub. No one cares about your life story or that magical christmas at Nana's house.

 

[insertcarehere]

I know 36 is basically ancient but *waves cane* this cancer of putting every-god-damn-thing in video format has to stop.

Even more mind blowing when so many videos are formatted for muted phones so are just text overlay on random video snippets... ITS JUST AN ARTICLE THAT I CANNOT READ AT MY OWN SPEED THAT WAS LIKELY MORE TIME CONSUMING TO ACTUALLY MAKE.

Also, get off my lawn.

I just get a chrome extension to set at 1.85x playback speed and do sponsor blocking nowadays, too much filler to sit through otherwise.

 

[Mopetar]

Maybe Google or Apple can develop something for their mobile devices that will scrub the video/audio for content and render it as simple text.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Maybe Google or Apple can develop something for their mobile devices that will scrub the video/audio for content and render it as simple text.

- And then abandon it in development purgatory three months later? No thanks

 

[guachi]

Google how many lbs in a stone.
10 minute video starting with the story of how when he was a boy, his mother used to take him to the garden and they'd walk.....

Recipes are the worst for that. Just tell me how many teaspoons of each spice for the beef roast rub. No one cares about your life story or that magical christmas at Nana's house.

You can't copyright a recipe so the added text has some purpose in this case.

 

[Hitman928]

You can't copyright a recipe so the added text has some purpose in this case.

The text he's referring to has nothing to do with trying to copyright anything. It's filler like the telling a story about the first time they tasted this recipe with a huge background of where they were, why they were there, who they were with, what clothes they were wearing, etc. etc. The real reason they do this is they make you scroll through all this filler that has embedded ads all the way through until you get to the actual recipe at the bottom. It's just trying to monetize the page as much as possible but really the only useful thing for the reader is the actual recipe at the bottom of the long article.

Edit: Just to add, the list of ingredients and cooking instructions isn't able to be copyrighted, but if you gave detailed instructions while adding a deeper understanding of why the ingredients are chosen or how to use them properly, you could copyright that and it would actually be useful for the reader.

 

[JoeRambo]

I think at this point it is obvious that any proper super resolution support needs motion vectors from game engine to function properly. And that means game engine needs to specifically support said technology.
Once said support is built in, there is a matter of potential speed up and quality of upscaled picture, that depends on algorithms and hardware.

I think it is obvious right now that DLSS 2.0 algorithms are state of the art, but built in hardware support is also critical - things need to happen "concurrently" to make the most speed up possible.
For example on Turing, NV had the following "workflow" for RT + DLSS



And in Ampere DLSS step can happen concurrently with other work on chip now:



So without dedicated hardware it would be just a blob of additional shader code (via DirectML), competing with rendering, limiting performance gains and/or hurting resulting image quality. That is why AMD is taking their sweet time with technology, no easy shortcuts possible.

 

[Mopetar]

Didn't AMD also say they wanted something that could be more of an open standard so that developers weren't stuck with separate implementations for consoles and PCs where each hardware/GPU vendor requires a specific configuration and individual implementation that just makes it take more time.

Maybe that's not feasible because good luck getting both Sony and Microsoft agreeing on anything as far as the consoles go and Nvidia will try to do their own thing for as long as they can.

 

[Stuka87]

Didn't AMD also say they wanted something that could be more of an open standard so that developers weren't stuck with separate implementations for consoles and PCs where each hardware/GPU vendor requires a specific configuration and individual implementation that just makes it take more time.

Maybe that's not feasible because good luck getting both Sony and Microsoft agreeing on anything as far as the consoles go and Nvidia will try to do their own thing for as long as they can.

Yes, they did. And it has worked in the past (Just look at FreeSync vs GSync). And while things may vary at the API level for the two consoles, they will be the similar at the hardware level. Much like how RRT is essentially the same at the hardware level.

 

[Mopetar]

It still took something like five years for Nvidia to come around to supporting FreeSync and they seem to have done so rather begrudgingly. The game studios would all have to pressure Nvidia to adopt whatever standard AMD might develop and the game studios are unlikely to do that if Nvidia keeps giving them money or promotional deals to use Nvidia technology. I'm pretty sure GameWorks is still being used even though some of that has been known to cause performance issues even on Nvidia cards.

 

[DeathReborn]

It still took something like five years for Nvidia to come around to supporting FreeSync and they seem to have done so rather begrudgingly. The game studios would all have to pressure Nvidia to adopt whatever standard AMD might develop and the game studios are unlikely to do that if Nvidia keeps giving them money or promotional deals to use Nvidia technology. I'm pretty sure GameWorks is still being used even though some of that has been known to cause performance issues even on Nvidia cards.

You mean Adaptive Sync right?

 

[Mopetar]

You mean Adaptive Sync right?

Both GSync and FreeSync were implementations of adaptive sync. My point was that even though Nvidia now supports FreeSync (or some version of it) with their cards, it took five years to get to that point, which meant separate displays for a long time. I think this xkcd comic sums up my sentiments rather nicely:

I can see why everyone says they want a standard, but a lot of people tend to really want everyone else to do it their way. So I have a feeling we're just going to wind up with a lot of different super sampling (or whatever they wind up getting called) implementations that don't work well together and make the landscape a bit muddier.

 

[Dribble]

Yes, they did. And it has worked in the past (Just look at FreeSync vs GSync). And while things may vary at the API level for the two consoles, they will be the similar at the hardware level. Much like how RRT is essentially the same at the hardware level.

Historically when it comes to software AMD look at what Nvidia has, announce something similar that's going to be better because it's open source (which normally means they expect open source devs to develop it for free with minimal AMD support), it never works and they quietly drop it.

 

[PhoBoChai]

I think at this point it is obvious that any proper super resolution support needs motion vectors from game engine to function properly. And that means game engine needs to specifically support said technology.
Once said support is built in, there is a matter of potential speed up and quality of upscaled picture, that depends on algorithms and hardware.

I think it is obvious right now that DLSS 2.0 algorithms are state of the art, but built in hardware support is also critical - things need to happen "concurrently" to make the most speed up possible.
For example on Turing, NV had the following "workflow" for RT + DLSS
View attachment 39483


And in Ampere DLSS step can happen concurrently with other work on chip now:

View attachment 39485

So without dedicated hardware it would be just a blob of additional shader code (via DirectML), competing with rendering, limiting performance gains and/or hurting resulting image quality. That is why AMD is taking their sweet time with technology, no easy shortcuts possible.

Doesn't make much difference in final perf.

Compare DLSS perf in Turing vs Ampere in reviews and see for yourself.

Because while it can run concurrently, it still has to share a very limited pool of registers as all the other shaders so you're bottlenecked by something else.

 

[coercitiv]

Historically when it comes to software AMD look at what Nvidia has, announce something similar that's going to be better because it's open source (which normally means they expect open source devs to develop it for free with minimal AMD support), it never works and they quietly drop it.

Yeah, look at Mantle. /s

 

[Dribble]

Yeah, look at Mantle. /s

You can look if you like, it backs up what I said - it was used in a tiny number of games and only worked well for a few cards in those games. No support for those games was maintained even for the next gen cards released a few months later. It quietly died. Mantle was released in 2013. Vulkan (it's successor) is the first thing to actually work properly and even today (2021) only used in a small fraction of games and it's really only id that make it work well.

Mantle should have been pretty simple - it was basically AMD exposing all their existing low level driver code to outside users. Unlike FFSS or whatever their DLSS equivalent is going to be called it didn't really require new software, just a bit of a clean-up of what they already had.

 

[Mopetar]

Mantle was specific to AMD's cards and it's good that it ultimately morphed into an open standard that isn't controlled by AMD alone. It's honestly the perfect example of how different parties can come together to create an open standard that can be used by anyone. AMD trying to keep pushing and maintaining Mantle wouldn't have been good for the industry. Because it's an open standard it has support from AMD, Nvidia, Intel, and many ARM SoC vendors and we don't have every vendor making their own specific Vulkan-like APIs that require tweaks and changes for each hardware platform.

 

[Stuka87]

Mantle was not GPU specific. But it did require a driver that only AMD had at the time as they were actively developing it. Vulkan is literally the exact same thing under a different name (Khronos group renamed it as part of the hand over). Mantle was always intended to go open source. Just like FreeSync was created to be open source (AdaptiveSync)

AMD also offer an open source Linux driver. Unlike nVidia that makes nearly everything as proprietary as possible, and doesn't even offer an open source driver for Linux.

 

[7beauties]

Sorry, no need to watch the video, basically just stating that FFSS (FX Super-sampling) is coming to AMD, to combat NVidias's DLSS.

This is assuming that AMD's FFSS is on par with Nvidia's DLSS. I hope so because I'm an AMD fanboy. Since all Nvidia 3080 and 3090 cards are out of stock as well as AMD's 6800XT and 6900XT cards, I'm willing to buy an AMD card with FFSS technology. My worry is, since I don't have bots to instantly scoop up these cards, I'll have to check Amazon, Best Buy, and Newegg around the clock and get little sleep. What a bloody mess.

 

[Mopetar]

If it's good it's good I suppose, but I'm still not in any hurry to get excited about what's essentially dropping my resolution and being able to fake enough of the difference that I might not notice.

This has a strong potential to turn into a can of worms that I don't think we'll be happy that we opened. At a minimum we should stop calling the results 4K or anything beyond what the native render resolution actually was. If the cards have ways of doctoring that image to make it scale up better that's fine, but it's not a native image rendered at that resolution.

 

[Stuka87]

If it's good it's good I suppose, but I'm still not in any hurry to get excited about what's essentially dropping my resolution and being able to fake enough of the difference that I might not notice.

This has a strong potential to turn into a can of worms that I don't think we'll be happy that we opened. At a minimum we should stop calling the results 4K or anything beyond what the native render resolution actually was. If the cards have ways of doctoring that image to make it scale up better that's fine, but it's not a native image rendered at that resolution.

Yeah, getting fed up with review sites mixing DLSS "4K" with real 4K. They should NOT be mixed.

 

[soresu]

Vulkan (it's successor) is the first thing to actually work properly and even today (2021) only used in a small fraction of games and it's really only id that make it work well.

Vulkan has a much greater following in open source than commercially, which is unsurprising considering its focus.

It's also a much younger standard than OpenGL and has only recently added necessary extensions to replace it in certain sectors like DCC.

Beyond that Vulkan 1.1 compatibility is required in any device implementing Android 10+, so it's installed base is already huge regardless of actual applications supporting it.

We can infer that this compatibility requirement probably means that the Android 10 UI code uses Vulkan to render it on the screen.

As for your "a small fraction of games" comment - using DXVK, VKD3D and more recently Zink the support in Linux for Windows games has massively increased due to the lower level nature of Vulkan allowing developers to use it as a HAL to implement another API like DX9 to 12, or OpenGL on top of it.

The general problem with Vulkan is that it requires far more developer investment to create a viable engine on top of it as the lions share of GPU compute management which is abstracted for OpenGL code requires a complete infrastructure in Vulkan.

While the downside is a lot of extra code investment - the upside is a far greater degree of control over system resources otherwise obscured by the driver abstraction with OpenGL, not to mention most of the time if there is a bug the chances are it is in your implementation in Vulkan rather than the drivers (as Vulkan drivers are also much simpler overall).

Were it not for Microsoft seizing on DX12 to create at least some impetus to move to Windows 10 then there would likely be far more support for Vulkan in Windows games - alas Epic clearly finds an extra backend on top of DX12 too much to bear on the Windows platform, especially when DX12 allows them to cover Xbox too.

Look outside of standard games though and you will find many emulator projects running Vulkan backends - Dolphin particularly from early on. but also PPSSPP, RPCS3, Cemu, Yuzu, Xenia, even the old PCSX2 was confirmed to be working on a Vulkan backend last year.

Not to mention nVidia's tentpole RTX real time path tracing demonstrator Quake 2 RTX was actually written with Vulkan and not DXR.

Albeit it initially used nVidia's vendor specific RT extensions prior to the vendor agnostic extensions being finalised upon RDNA2's release.

Oh and another thing, Vulkan also has a backend in ANGLE which translates OpenGL ES 2-3 code on systems lacking a OpenGL ES driver - this translation layer is in many Chrome and Firefox distributions as WebGL is basically web happy OpenGL ES.

The point being, for a standard not even 5 years old yet it is doing pretty damn well indeed.