AMD Unveils Radeon Boost + and DLSS Response in Spring Adrenaline Driver Update
We’ve already pointed out to our readers that AMD never released its traditional major graphics driver update last year, so all builds released this year are still in the Adrenalin 2020 Edition. There seems to be a good reason.
Since the release of the RDNA family of graphics cards, AMD has worked on its ecosystem’s software side: the Radeon Software Adrenaline 2020 Edition is one of the largest updates in recent years. The company has unveiled 20 redesigned or new features, including Radeon Boost, Radeon Chill, Enhanced Sync, Anti-Lag, and Integer Scaling.
AMD is apparently working on the next major Radeon Software update and is reportedly slated to launch in the spring. One of the major innovations will be the emergence of an alternative to DLSS known as FidelityFX Super Resolution. The technology will be open source and rely on the DirectML API to scale images with minimal quality loss. Unlike the NVIDIA implementation, this is a software-based method that only requires Microsoft DirectX compatibility.
Although FidelityFX Super Resolution should work on any accelerator, including NVIDIA RTX graphics cards, the maximum output will be observed in the Radeon RX 6000 line due to the high-speed L3 Infinity Cache buffer of 128 MB. Machine learning algorithms tend to require high throughput, and this is what this cache is for.
The current implementation of Radeon Boost relies essentially on lowering game resolution in tough scenes to improve performance. When it comes to active movement, and most of the details are blurry anyway, it works; but in static or slow-moving scenes, the drop in resolution is clearly visible.
An improved version of Radeon Boost + will improve image quality in static scenes by using a new mechanism that uses Variable Rate Shading technology at the driver level for parts of the frame that are stationary and do not need to be recalculated. Recall that the VRS technology presented at GDC 2019, which became part of the DirectX 12 API, is similar to NVIDIA Adaptive Shading and is designed to reduce the load when rendering peripheral objects and zones (for example, a homogeneous sea of fog) by reducing the accuracy of the calculations.
Judging by the published slide, Radeon Boost + will require support in games. Whether FidelityFX Super Resolution will be able to work with any games is not specified. Still, if you rely on the experience of NVIDIA DLSS, this question can be previously answered negatively.
