AMD Releases Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.6.1 Driver with FidelityFX Super Resolution Support

[Brian_B]

The problem is Ray Tracing now. It's never going to be fast enough, especially when a game is fully ray traced or path traced, to work without some sort of method like upscaling to improve performance. The cart is running ahead of the horse on this particular feature.

I had a nasty thought, imagine not even rendering locally anymore, just streaming from a cloud AI your rendered game. Maybe the future isn't even local rendering AT ALL. Now that's a scary thought.

That's defintely where Microsoft wants you to go - wasn't there a feature or API on the Xbox One where it could use Azure to remotely render/compute stuff in games?

Xbox One & Azure cloud computing: A match made in heaven

One aspect of the new Xbox One really gets me fired up: Game developers should now be able to use Microsoft Azure's cloud computing platform to make games more powerful than ever.

venturebeat.com

 

[Stoly]

Honestly, I'd rather just have faster hardware than rely on either. Isn't that what we would do in the old days? Just buy a faster video card. Or in the case of Crysis, wait for that video card to get created.

If only you could actually get a faster card.

 

[Stoly]

The problem is Ray Tracing now. It's never going to be fast enough, especially when a game is fully ray traced or path traced, to work without some sort of method like upscaling to improve performance. The cart is running ahead of the horse on this particular feature.

I had a nasty thought, imagine not even rendering locally anymore, just streaming from a cloud AI your rendered game. Maybe the future isn't even local rendering AT ALL. A "video card" that is nothing but AI rendering cores to stream in data and AI it to your screen. Now that's a scary thought.

GeforceNow? Stadia?

 

[Stoly]

The problem is Ray Tracing now. It's never going to be fast enough, especially when a game is fully ray traced or path traced, to work without some sort of method like upscaling to improve performance. The cart is running ahead of the horse on this particular feature.

I had a nasty thought, imagine not even rendering locally anymore, just streaming from a cloud AI your rendered game. Maybe the future isn't even local rendering AT ALL. A "video card" that is nothing but AI rendering cores to stream in data and AI it to your screen. Now that's a scary thought.

Never say never
RT can be fast enough, sure it needs to get orders of magnitude faster, but it still "in its infancy" Remember just a few years ago even the best video card out there took minutes to render a single raytraced frame. Today you can play play WatchDogs Legions with RT at over glorius 30fps with just a RTX3080Ti. It's not going to happen tomorrow or the next day, but rest assured RT is going to run pretty fast soon.

Besides the AI bag of tricks is not even half empty...

 

[Stoly]

Where I think SuperRes will hit hard is in the Xbox series X/S. Console gamers are much more forgiving with decreasing IQ. They are used to lower resolutions, blurrier textures, and tricks like checkeredboard rendering. I'm sure many will say it looks as good as a RTX3080Ti.

 

[Auer]

 

[Grimlakin]

Man I remember doing LAN games of Quake running at some crap resolution upscaled to whatever my CRT could handle... and we didn't have all of the triliniar BS either. You were shooting a rail gun at literal pixels and it was fun.

Or lets move the way back meter a few years before that and you had tanks that were literally two triangles leaning against eachother firing shells (squares) at eachother. It was 3d and multiplayer so it was awesome.

Doom lan parties bringing down corporate network switches due to excessive traffic...

Counterstrike mod's on Half Life 2.. (yes it was a mod before it was a game.)

RATS mod maps on HL2.. Man I miss those.

 

[Stoly]

 

[SmokeRngs]

I would argue, never in this way.

Remember the whole Quake/Quak issue? Remember lowering Trilinear, heck even Bilinear Filtering and Mip Mapping quality to improve performance? Those things were counted as CHEATS back in the day, and everyone got mad and frowned upon it. And now we are accepting a lowering of IQ in this manner. A decade ago, it would be sacrilidge. So yeah, I get it. It's a topic I'd bring up in an article as well when I do my article. It's really weird how we are all ok with it now.

But the Quake/Quack issue was completely different. That was companies intentionally sabotaging their drivers while trying to hide it in order to gain performance from benchmarks. It was a deceitful attempt to trick people into thinking something was better than it was and no one had a choice in the matter until these companies were caught and had to revert the changes in the drivers.

FSR and DLSS are means of upscaling which a person can enable or disable as they please. Neither is forced on anyone (at least on PC) and both companies advertise and promote the options rather than hiding them in order to win some benchmarks.

Whether the quality loss is worth it is up to the individual and is little different from adjusting graphical settings, details and resolutions to get the performance and image quality desired based on what the hardware is capable of doing.