AMD is chasing Nvidia’s frame generation tail, but is FSR 3 all it’s promised to be? Gamers can start finding out from today.
It’s been a long wait, but AMD has finally released their answer to Nvidia’s DLSS 3 (and 3.5) with FSR 3 (FidelityFX Super Resolution). So far it’s only supported in two games, Immortals of Avenum and Forespoken which aren’t exactly fan favorites (both games sitting in the 60-70 range on metacritic) but AMD’s Frank Azor promises that it the solution will roll out to more and more games eventually “as we saw with prior versions of FSR. which are now supported in over 300 announced games.”
Unlike Nvidia’s DLSS solution, FSR is graphics card agonistic, meaning its supported on of course AMD’s Radeon GPUs, but also on Nvidia GPUs, and even Intel’s Arc GPUs. Specifically you’ll need AMD Radeon cards from the RX 5000, 6000 or 7000 product lines, but while 5000 is technically supported, AMD themselves recommend sticking to 6000 or 7000 cards. On Nvidia’s side you’ll need any card branded RTX (as opposed to GTX), meaning the popular RTX 1660 and 1000 line is out, but any other GPU from Nvidia from the last 4 years should be good (since the launch of the 2000 series).
FSR3 is reported to nearly double the frame rate in Forespoken when playing at 1440P, but that is a figure AMD themselves have arrived at, and we’re still waiting for widespread testing by independent outlets (using several different GPUs) to know for sure if we can trust this metric. Early reports from testing does seem to show that while the performance is certainly improved drastically from FSR2 to FSR3, it still isn’t quite as good as DLSS3 from Nvidia, whether that’s in image quality, artifacts, or pure FPS increases.
Each game will also require patches from the developers to begin supporting FSR3, which could be a tall order given how much more popular Nvidia’s GPUs are in the marketplace, which could lead many developers to reconsider whether or not its even worth the effort. But like Frank Azor pointed out, previous versions of FSR is already supported in over 300 titles, so AMD Radeon GPU owners shouldn’t feel too worried that their favorite game won’t get the upgrade. Starfield in particular is surely going to get a patch to support it any day now, given the co-marketing deal Bethesda and AMD signed in the lead-up to the game’s launch. Beyond that Square Enix, Massive Entertainment, Ubisoft, Unreal, Focus Entertainment, CD Project Red, Sega, Saber Interactive and other studios big and small have all signed up and promise to develop and/or update their games to utilize the technology.
