AMD at Computex 2021: FSR vs. DLSS, Ryzen 5000 APUs, and Radeon RX 6000M GPUs | TechSpot One thing that Radeon GPUs have lacked for quite some time now is a true competitor to
Nvidia’s DLSS, but that's changing this month with the launch of FidelityFX Super Resolution or FSR. This is AMD’s long awaited alternative that will attempt to upscale games from a lower render resolution to a higher output resolution, allowing for higher levels of performance without a significant reduction to visuals – or ideally the same visual quality. AMD is not providing a ton of details just yet, but we do have a release date of June 22, which is just around the corner. This is when we’ll see the first game get patched with FSR support.
FSR is part of AMD’s GPUOpen program, and as such it's supposed to work on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs, even those that don’t support DLSS, like the GeForce 10 series. AMD lists support for RX Vega, RX 500, RX 5000 and RX 6000 series GPUs, and all Ryzen APUs with Radeon Graphics. They won’t be providing technical support on GPUs from other vendors but we do know that FSR will work on Nvidia GPUs from at least Pascal and newer. AMD teased FSR performance in two situations: the first is Godfall running on an RX 6800 XT using Epic settings and ray tracing at 4K resolution. Without FSR, the game was running at 49 FPS. With FSR using the Ultra Quality mode, performance increased to 78 FPS, a 59% increase. That margin jumped to 2X using the Quality mode, and exceeded 2X in both the Balanced and Performance modes. AMD hasn’t shared what render resolutions each of these modes are running at, but the performance claims are impressive, and we can see there will be a range of FSR options to choose from. These performance uplifts are in line with what Nvidia claims with DLSS 2.0 in the latest titles, but of course, this is just one game and we have no idea how it was tested.
The second performance teaser we got was actually on Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1060 running Godfall again at 1440p Epic settings. FSR running in the Quality mode, so one step down from the highest mode, delivered a 41% higher frame rate and took the game above 30 FPS on average. AMD said they chose this demo because the GTX 1060 is the most popular GPU used today on Steam, and of course, they want to boast about how FSR works on this GPU while DLSS does not. This performance uplift is lower than what was seen previously at 4K using the 6800 XT, so that’s something to explore in the future as there is a chance that FSR won't perform the same on AMD as it does on Nvidia. The big question mark remains visual quality. We only saw two still images with side-by-side comparison shots, no video comparisons, and certainly nothing in true detail. The first image looked quite good but the second showed clear differences and the FSR image was obviously inferior, showing less detail and more blur.
That's all the information we have for now and we'll have to try it for ourselves soon to assess visual quality in depth. What we do know are two additional things: AMD is calling this a "spatial upscaling technology," with no mention of AI or temporal upscaling, although I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a temporal element that used information from multiple frames. No mention of "better than native" quality either, which most likely would just be marketing speak. As for game support. Like DLSS, FSR requires integration on a per-game basis. AMD claims that 10 game studios and engines will integrate FSR in 2021, with an unspecified number of games. Godfall is one of those, and we might see a list of games as early as today on AMD’s website, but we weren’t provided one during the pre-briefing. In this sense, AMD is starting miles behind Nvidia which has been able to grow DLSS 2.0 support substantially in the 18 months since it was first deployed.
Next up we have news of two new APUs for the desktop market, the Ryzen 7 5700G and Ryzen 5 5600G had been previously announced for the OEM market, but will now be coming to the DIY market in essentially the same form.
The Ryzen 7 5700G is an 8-core, 16-thread processor using AMD’s Zen 3 architecture, clocked up to 4.6 GHz with 16 MB of L3 cache and a 65W TDP. There is also a Vega GPU inside with 8 compute units clocked up to 2 GHz. This is the same Cezanne die that AMD are using for Ryzen Mobile 5000 APUs like the Ryzen 9 5900HX, so it’s a monolithic design rather than chiplet based, and has half the L3 cache but still features a unified CCX. Complementing this CPU is the Ryzen 5 5600G, which is a six-core processor clocked up to 4.4 GHz, also with 16 MB of L3 cache and with 7 Vega compute units clocked up to 1.9 GHz. The Ryzen 3 quad-core option announced for OEMs is not being brought across to the desktop market.
AMD is positioning these processors as lower cost Zen 3 alternatives to the current X-models with no integrated graphics that have been in the market for some time now. The company acknowledged that there has been a lot of demand for non-X CPUs and apparently these parts are set to fill that gap.
Unfortunately though, these aren’t really the low cost CPUs many have been looking for. The Ryzen 5 5600G is priced at $260, $40 less than the Ryzen 5 5600, but not the $200-220 that many people were hoping a Ryzen 5 5600 would slot into, so even after this announcement we still don’t have a $200 Zen 3 processor of any kind (your only option in this segment are previous generation AMD products, or Intel).
Good news from AMD