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

[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.

 

[soresu]

and we don't have every vendor making their own specific Vulkan-like APIs that require tweaks and changes for each hardware platform.

Weeelllll, not every hardware vendor anyway for sure.

Moves to stab Microsoft and Apple for making their own low level APIs before Vulkan.

 

[Shamrock]

Oh wow. I'm not getting my hopes up, but dang. It leaked that AMD is getting DOUBLE the performance from Super Res.

 

[Sable]

Oh wow. I'm not getting my hopes up, but dang. It leaked that AMD is getting DOUBLE the performance from Super Res.

lol. no chance

 

[Leeea]

Oh wow. I'm not getting my hopes up, but dang. It leaked that AMD is getting DOUBLE the performance from Super Res.

As an AMD fanboy for many years, I can assure you, hopes will be crushed.

I just purchased a 6900 xt (but have not received the tracking number yet). As such I am hoping amd's super resolution can save its less then great ray tracing performance.

Pretty sure my hopes are also going to be crushed.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

God why does everything AMD have to go from 0 to hypetrain in under 60 seconds?

 

[Hitman928]

Oh wow. I'm not getting my hopes up, but dang. It leaked that AMD is getting DOUBLE the performance from Super Res.

I don't really want to give them rumor monger channels a view, what is the context of double performance? You can easily get double performance as well from DLSS if you set the native resolution low enough compared to render res.

 

[Mopetar]

There's also a question of image quality as well since both are essentially faking a high resolution image and there's no guarantee that one solution does as good as another.

Double performance is irrelevant if the results look like garbage by comparison.

AMD has certainly been on a roll lately, but the odds they leapfrog Nvidia like that aren't close to likely. If the are twice as fast, there's a catch in there.

 

[Steltek]

There's also a question of image quality as well since both are essentially faking a high resolution image and there's no guarantee that one solution does as good as another.

Double performance is irrelevant if the results look like garbage by comparison.

AMD has certainly been on a roll lately, but the odds they leapfrog Nvidia like that aren't close to likely. If the are twice as fast, there's a catch in there.

There is always a catch related to this stuff. The question yet to be answered will be whether it will be something that you can live with or not.

 

[Mopetar]

If it's faster for worse IQ I could live with that. I don't have to use it. It probably makes more sense for them to go that route because they've got to make something that will last the consoles for an entire generation and frame rates are probably a bigger concern.

What I probably won't be able to live with is the amount of feces flinging from the sycophants on both sides as they argue back and forth over a feature that I would rather not use at all.

It's like traveling back in time to an era when everyone was fighting about AA implementations, only now it's over something utterly banal. Congratulations in advance to whichever GPU does a better job of convincing its fan base that it's a better, more capable GPU than it actually is.

 

[DiogoDX]

1440p is about half the pixels of 4K and AMD loses more performance going to 4K than nvidia. I also expect the new cards to be really fast with this.

The problem is always the IQ. DLSS 1.0 had good gains in fps but looked like crap.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

If AMD is able to get this feature built in at the console level/engine level for devs, then its already game over for NV's DLSS. It might persist as an ultra-enthusiast option on NV sponsored games, but won't be enough to really sway any fence sitters.

 

[Stuka87]

As an AMD fanboy for many years, I can assure you, hopes will be crushed.

I just purchased a 6900 xt (but have not received the tracking number yet). As such I am hoping amd's super resolution can save its less then great ray tracing performance.

Pretty sure my hopes are also going to be crushed.

RTRT and SuperRes/DLSS should not be lumped together.

Ray Tracing performance is what it is. Currently AMD is much slower than nVidia, without any sort of upscaling involved. Going by history, it will probably take a year of driver improvements to get this better, combined with Navi3 changes.

As for doubling performance, this may be the result of some quality configuration. Low quality, super fast! Higher quality, not as fast.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Always read this title as 'AMD's answer to DLSS, FFS'

 

[Leeea]

RTRT and SuperRes/DLSS should not be lumped together.

I disagree, I feel good upscaling would be a raytracing game changer for me. If I can drop my base resolution down to 1080p, then even on a AMD card I should be able to enable raytracing with acceptable framerates.

Control chugs along with 1440p @ 60 fps + raytracing enabled on a 6900 xt.
Metro Exodus chugs along with 1440p @ 70 fps + raytracing enabled
Watch Dogs 1440p @ 45 fps.

If I was able to drop that to 1080p and upscale, it seems I could have raytracing + playable framerates.

Of those three games, Control is really the only one that interests me. Although if Metro Exodus was on sale for <$10 I would pick it up.

( my fps numbers came from here: https://www.techspot.com/review/2160-amd-radeon-6900-xt/ )

notes:
buying a 6900 xt from amd.com at MSRP of $999 is cheaper then buying:
3060 ti @ market price ( $1500 )
3070 @ market price ( $1300 )
3080 @ market price ( $2300 )

So do not compare its ray tracing to the 3090, compare it to the 3060. For me the 6900xt was the obtainable budget/discount choice.

You can laugh, but I will point out the 3080 has steadily climbed on ebay. It started months ago around $1300, and now it is over $2000. The graphics card shortage is not going away, it is getting worse.

 

[Shmee]

It would be nice to have DLSS/FFSS without needing to turn on Raytracing though. For instance, in COD MW, I have raytracing off, and I cannot figure out how to turn on DLSS. Is it only for raytracing, or am I missing something?

 

[Mopetar]

I swear I've seen several benchmarks (maybe not CoD though) where DLSS has been used without any ray tracing. Maybe it depends on the title and what they support.

 

[Stuka87]

I disagree, I feel good upscaling would be a raytracing game changer for me. If I can drop my base resolution down to 1080p, then even on a AMD card I should be able to enable raytracing with acceptable framerates.

But DLSS/SuperRes doesn't improve ray tracing performance. It will increase your frame rates at say 4K if the base resolution is 1080P. But if you compare that to regular 1080P, the regular 1080P will be faster (For DLSS at least, it has about 15-25% hit on performance due to overhead depending on the game).

So will DLSS/SuperRes make RTRT more usable? Sure will.

Will it INCREASE RTRT performance, nope.

Now, if AMD/nVidia comes up with a way to shoot fewer rays for equal-ish quality by using some sort of ray upscaler, then THAT would increase RTRT performance.