Equipment news Your Xbox games are about to get even smoother, and here’s why
Published on 06/24/2022 at 19:05
Yesterday, Microsoft announced the rollout of FSR 2.0 in the development kits it makes available to creators who want to release their games on Xbox. Developed by AMD, this scaling method, which allows for smoother graphics without loss of image quality, was already present on the Xbox version 1.0 consoles. What will this technology change and will it be exclusive to Microsoft? Explanations.
FSR 2.0 Coming Soon to Xbox Consoles?
Xbox and AMD work hand in hand. Last year, the “first generation” FSR was launched on the manufacturer’s consoles. Jason Ronalda spokesman for Microsoft’s gaming division spoke of a “close partnership” with AMD, whose components are also used in the Xbox Series X and S.
This partnership continues today as version 2.0 of FidelityFX Super Resolution technology was included in the Xbox Game Development Kit. In short, this means that studios will be able to easily use this technology once they create an Xbox game. Announcement released by GPUOpen, AMD’s open source resource sharing platform, and backed by Ronald himself.
Even more surprising: Xbox One should also benefit from this improvement, according to AMD’s post. Given today’s datasheet for this old-gen console, we’re waiting to see to what extent this possibility actually materializes.
FSR 2.0, why?
FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) is often considered AMD’s “answer” to NVIDIA’s (powerful) Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology. Although it is not based on the same principle, FSR also improves the performance and smoothness of games based on image scaling at a lower native resolution.
Promising and shared by open source logic, FSR has been a great success, which AMD is pleased with: “over 110 games” are already compatible – the adoption rate is much faster than DLSS, according to the manufacturer. .
At the same time, FSR remains less efficient than its competitor. A bug that FSR 2.0, released last May, intends to fix by optimizing anti-aliasing performance to reduce loss of fidelity and deliver visual quality equivalent to, if not better than, native resolution. . . .
FSR 2.0, when will it be on PS5?
Like the first version, FSR 2.0 is an open source technology available to all developers. So, in absolute terms, it can be used in all next-generation games, whether they’re released on PC, Xbox Series X/S, or PS5, especially since PS5 also uses an AMD-made architecture.
However, in reality, the integration of FSR 2.0 “by default” into the Xbox game development kit should make it much easier for creators targeting Microsoft’s consoles to adopt it. AMD has already revealed a long list of compatible games available or in the future, including Deathloop, The Callisto Protocol, and Microsoft Flight Simulator.
For its part, Sony has made no announcement about the democratization of the technology, leaving it up to the studios to use it. The PC version of God of War, for its part, is one of the compatible games. It should be said that the Japanese manufacturer has also been slow to initiate PS5 compatibility with VRR, and that the Japanese firm has rather focused its communication on its line of games, where Microsoft, since the beginning of this generation, often talk about graphics power.