Radeon Super Resolution Tested – Is this AMD’s new Killer Feature?

Conclusion – We love it!

AMD’s new Radeon Super Resolution screen is a clever use of the company’s FidelityFX Super Resolution technology. With FSR 1.0 being a spatial upscaler, there was no reason why AMD could not use it as a driver-level upscaling solution. Through RSR, AMD has delivered a form of FidelityFX Super Resolution support to almost all PC games. That’s awesome. 

RSR can be enabled with a couple of clicks within AMD’s GPU drivers. After that, all you will need to do is select a resolution that is below your monitor’s native resolution. For 4K screen users, resolutions like 1800p, 1440p, or 1080p are suitable choices. 

While RSR is based on the same technology as FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 1.0, FSR should offer gamers better results in supported games. Simply put, FSR can be applied at an optimal place within a game’s rendering pipeline to deliver higher quality results. With RSR, AMD is applying their FSR algorithm to completed frames, resulting in somewhat sub-optimal results. That said, for games that lack strong upscaling support, RSR is a godsend.

For games like Total War Warhammer III, RSR can deliver similar to native 4K results and large performance gains for Radeon users. When compared to Total War Warhammer III’s integrated resolution scaling solution, RSR delivers higher quality results and more performance. That’s a win-win for Radeon users. Playing Total War Warhammer III using RSR to scale 1440p to 4K is now my preferred way to play the game. Total War Warhammer III would benefits greatly from a high quality image upscaling solution, and with RSR, AMD has delivered.

While RSR is a great solution, it is not a magic bullet that will fix all of your problems. 1080p to 4K upscaling with RSR will not deliver image quality levels that are close to native. That said, it delivers better results than allowing your screen to upscale 1080p to 4K, and can deliver much better results than the resolution scaling solutions used by some games.

Hopefully, AMD will open up RSR to users of older Radeon graphics cards in the near future. Currently, RSR can only be used with AMD’s RX 5000 series and RX 6000 series graphics cards.

You can join the discussion on AMD’s Radeon Super Resolution Technology on the OC3D Forums.