Nvidia and AMD have gone head-to-head once more with DLSS 4.5 and FSR Redstone, respectively, and to this point, I’ve examined the latter, particularly analyzing its body technology replace, and I can merely say that I am impressed.
FSR 4 upscaling has already made big developments in comparison with FSR 3.1. I covered this a long while ago and highlighted that its super-resolution picture high quality was nice, even surpassing Nvidia’s DLSS 3 (which was extra related at the moment), however nonetheless trailed behind DLSS 4.
ML Frame Generation’s image quality is a huge improvement
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Thanks to help from AMD and Razer, I used to be in a position to get my fingers on an ASRock Challenger Radeon RX 9060 XT and the Razer Core X V2 for testing – and on this event, I used my Lenovo Legion Go S Z1 Excessive working the eGPU on Windows 11.
Now, I am totally conscious that this is not the greatest benchmark to run, as there is a clear bottleneck with a RX 9060 XT and Z1 Excessive setup. Nonetheless, picture high quality was my foremost concern, and I wished to see how good FSR Redstone can be in a plug-and-play handheld gaming situation.
With that in thoughts, I nonetheless bought nice outcomes, as a result of whereas working Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 utilizing the brand new ML Body Era, I hardly observed the problems of ghosting that FSR 3.1’s Body Era (Analytical) offered when utilizing it with the RX 9060 XT.
With the earlier mannequin, characters and different fast-moving objects on display screen would depart behind noticeable trails, and whereas this is not fully absent with Redstone, it isn’t practically as evident.
It won’t be solely noticeable within the screenshots above, however swinging throughout skyscrapers in Insomniac’s large open world was sufficient for me to appreciate that AMD has achieved an awesome job at cleansing up the irritating artifacts body interpolation introduces, however sadly, it isn’t all nice information.
Frame pacing is still an issue and a dealbreaker
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Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy with what FSR Redstone presented me, and particularly with how it transforms handheld gaming performance (despite the very obvious bottleneck). I mean, this eGPU dock setup makes ray tracing possible on a portable device that isn’t a gaming laptop.
However, the major downside of FSR Redstone is, unfortunately, its frame pacing issues. It seems as though these problems have carried over from FSR 3.1 and remain the one problem FSR just can’t shrug off.
Yes, you can say that my CPU bottleneck in this test has a part to play in these frame pacing issues, but I’ve tested this at higher resolutions where the CPU bottleneck is less of an issue, and also seen the same complaints from several users and reviewers, so I know I’m not alone in what I witnessed when testing.
If you look closely enough, you will likely notice a spiky frame time graph when using FSR Redstone ML Frame Generation, which results in gameplay that doesn’t feel as smooth as it should, even with a high frame rate. Screen tearing and noticeable input lag are telltale signs for me, and Digital Foundry, Hardware Unboxed, and plenty of extra have highlighted the identical drawback.
Whereas these body pacing issues will be mitigated by way of enabling v-sync on a driver-level or in video games that body gen and v-sync work concurrently, this can considerably enhance enter lag. The identical will be achieved by limiting body charges, however this defeats a few of body gen’s function, which is to massively increase body charges.
What makes issues worse is that Nvidia not too long ago launched DLSS 4.5, which is already being praised for the enhancements in picture high quality, due to its 2nd gen transformer mannequin, and its super-resolution is accessible to all RTX GPU customers (even when it supposedly has worse efficiency on older playing cards).
AMD’s FSR 4 and FSR Redstone are unique to RDNA 4, so shoppers with older Radeon GPUs will not even be involved with upscaling till it is formally backported to RDNA 3. Group Purple deserves credit score the place credit score is due for the enhancements made with Redstone, nevertheless it nonetheless has work to do if it needs to catch its rival.
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