It’s time to upscale FSR 2 even further: Meet FSR 2.1!

Originally posted:September 8, 2022

Colin Riley

Building on the success of FSR 2

Earlier this year, we announcedAMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 (FSR 2), with thesource code andplugin for Unreal Engine available here on GPUOpen from June onwards. The rate of adoption from game developers has been exceptional – as of today, FSR 2 upscaling technology has been announced for45 available and upcoming games, with 20 of those already available now!

As we stated in ourFSR 2 source code release post, we are always making improvements, and today we continue in that effort by releasing our first major update with FSR 2.1. In fact, you can see FSR 2.1 for yourself in the latest 1.7.1 patch for Farming Simulator 2022, released earlier this week by Giants:

JPG (1260x1000)

The comparison images above are taken from 4K screenshots, cropped to show a 1:1 resolution, and saved at 85% JPEG compression for file size reasons.

Watch FSR 2.1 in action in Farming Simulator 2022 (YouTube link)

What’s new with FSR 2.1?

FSR 2.1 includes significant changes to certain parts of the algorithm which allows games to further increase quality and reduce artefacts such as ghosting or shimmering. Take a look:

Change	Impact
Motion vector divergence used to diminish locked pixels	This should alleviate ghosting issues on geometry with motion vectors not matching underlying pixel colors.
Disocclusion logic is now able to detect disocclusions in areas with only small depth separation between objects.	This should alleviate ghosting issues and improve upscaling quality on some disocclusion cases.
Improved upscaled output quality by turning some half-precision computations to full precision.	This should improve overall color range and temporal stability of the upscaled image produced.
Reactive Mask updates: Dilation now based on input colors to avoid expanding of reactiveness into non-relevant areas of the upscaled output. The full data range`[0.0, 1.0]` is now used.	This should alleviate ghosting issues on transparent geometry such as particles.
Composition and Transparency Mask updates: Dilation now based on input colors to avoid expanding of lock diminishing into non-relevant areas of the upscaled output.	This should alleviate ghosting issues on geometry with motion vectors not matching underlying pixel colors.

In addition to the above major changes, the sample has been updated to include examples of animated textures, spark particles, and smoke particles. The generation of Reactive Mask and Composition and Transparency Mask resources are also now included. The UI has options to disable use of the masks, so developers can see the quality improvements that come to the upscaled output when the masks are provided to the FSR 2 API.

Lastly, FSR 2.1 includes many small bug fixes, as well as documentation fixes and improvements.

The application-side FSR 2 API has not changed, so updating to FSR 2.1 from 2.0 should be simple. Developers should pay particular attention to the changes to the Reactive Mask to get the best quality upscale. If there are any issues, please reach out to your AMD representative for assistance.

We’ve also updated ourFidelityFX Naming Guidelines for FSR 2 – make sure you take a look.

Unreal Engine FSR 2 plugin updates

As well as updating theFSR 2 source code, we’ve also updated ourUnreal Engine plugins as well, meaning you can now upgrade to using FSR 2.1 in your Unreal games for UE 4.26, 4.27, and UE 5.

It’s important that we draw your attention to the documentation for our updated plugins. We’ve provided a lot of new information on performance recommendations and known issues in ourhow-to guide, which we strongly recommend you read in order to get the best performance from FSR 2.1.

This includes highlighting new patches for Unreal Engine (which you can find in the plugin package) to help improve things for your game even further. A more detailed guide on using these will appear on GPUOpen in the near future.

How to use the AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution 2 (FSR 2) Unreal Engine plugin

Find out how to install and configure the AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2 plugin for Unreal Engine 4.26/4.27 and UE5.

Thank you!

And finally, we must thank those in the community who have taken the time to file issues on theGPUOpen FSR 2 GitHub repository. It is very much appreciated. Many of those issues have fixes included within FSR 2.1.

For more information, make sure to visit ourFSR 2 page, orview the extensive documentation directly in our GitHub repository.

FARMING SIMULATOR 22 © 2021 GIANTS Software. Farming Simulator, GIANTS Software and its logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of GIANTS Software. All rights reserved. All other names, trademarks and logos are property of their respective owners.

Colin Riley

Colin leads AMD's Game Engineering Core Technology Group. Based out of Edinburgh, Scotland, he is focused on helping game developers get the most out of new rendering technologies on AMD GPUs for PC, Unreal Engine, and other partner ecosystems.