Microsoft has announced that AMD’s FSR 4 upscaling technology is now optimized for Xbox and, as a result, is now available on Asus ROG Xbox Ally handhelds, as well as Xbox Series X/S. The company said that it worked closely with AMD to bring the feature to its hardware, so that the RDNA 2-based GPUs in the devices could handle the machine learning-based upscaling run smoothly.
It is worth noting, however, that this announcement is aimed largely at developers. The new version of Microsoft GDK (Game Development Kit) features a sample that shows how FSR4 can be integrated into games to work across current-gen Xbox devices. The support includes Full and Lite INT8 models, giving developers more choices when it comes to rendering resolutions and the trade-offs that have to be made with upscaling.
A table has been provided showcasing how running the INT8 model on an Xbox Series X with an output resolution of 1440p can result in 1.29 ms of extra time needed. Outputting at 4K, however, takes up 2.75 ms instead. Similarly, there is also data about FSR4 Full, as well as how the tradeoffs would work across a range of resolutions.
As for when players will get to reap the benefits of this, it largely comes down to how long developers take to update their games.
Microsoft and AMD had announced that FSR 4.1 would be coming to Xbox Series X/S and ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X just last month. At the time, AMD had also confirmed that it had worked with Asus to ensure that the upscaling technology would work smoothly on the handheld gaming PCs, as well as other Asus products running on AMD’s hardware.
As for Xbox, AMD referred to the launch as a “milestone” that “builds on more than two decades of collaboration” between the two companies. AMD also said that “we’re just getting started: Project Helix with leverage AMD FSR ‘Diamond’ to push next-generation gaming even further.”
In a statement, Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet said that the two companies “have been pushing gaming forward across Xbox and Windows from the silicon at the heart of our consoles and handhelds, to technologies like DirectX, Advanced Shader Delivery, and AutoSR that helps developers get more from the hardware and deliver better experiences for our players.”
When it comes to console hardware, industry insiders have speculated that the arrival of FSR 4.1 on consoles would benefit the Xbox Series X more than it does the PS5. This essentially comes down to PS5 hardware only being capable of INT8-based algorithms. While the PS5 Pro has plenty of horsepower to appropriately use the feature, the PS5 is quite behind the Xbox Series X when it comes to INT8 performance, coming in at 20 TOPS (trillion operations per second) when compared to Xbox Series X’s 48.6 TOPS.
In the meantime, AMD is working with both Sony and Microsoft on next-generation hardware. While details remain scarce for now, we will likely start seeing more reports over the course of the coming year.
