And, to drop into op-ed mode, this is where AMD has me a bit worried. In our pre-briefing with AMD, the company did confirm that FSR is going to be a purely spatial upscaling technology; it will operate on a frame-by-frame basis, without taking into account motion data (motion vectors) from the game itself.
For GPU junkies, many of you will recognize this as a similar strategy to how NVIDIA designed DLSS 1.0, which was all about spatial upscaling by using pre-trained, game-specific neural network models. DLSS 1.0 was ultimately a failure – it couldn’t consistently produce acceptable results and temporal artifacting was all too common. It wasn’t until NVIDIA introduced DLSS 2.0, a significantly expanded version of the technology that integrated motion vector data (essentially creating Temporal AA on steroids), that they finally got DLSS as we know it in working order.
Given NVIDIA’s experience with spatial-only upscaling, I’m concerned that AMD is going to repeat NVIDIA’s early mistakes. Spatial is a lot easier to do on the backend – and requires a lot less work from developers – but the lack of motion vector data presents some challenges. In particular, motion vectors are the traditional solution to countering temporal artifacting in TAA/DLSS, which is what ensures that there are no frame-by-frame oddities or other rendering errors from moving objects. Which is not to say that spatial-only upscaling can’t work, only that, if it’s competitive in image quality with DLSS, that would be a big first for AMD.