AMD’s FidelityFX brings Shadow of the Tomb Raider’s visuals to new heights

Conclusion

Temporal Anti-Aliasing is a solution to one of gaming’s biggest problems, Aliasing. Yes, solutions like MSAA were available previously, but that came at a considerable performance cost and only worked on the aliasing of geometric edges. The only major downsides of TAA is some added blur and the introduction of ghosting artefacts on some fast-moving objects. That said, these downsides will vary depending on how TAA is implemented within a game. 

Radeon’s FidelityFX is designed to mitigate the blur that’s present in most modern games, which comes mostly thanks to TAA and similar anti-aliasing solutions. AMD plans to allow gamers to benefit from aliasing-stopping functions of TAA while mitigating this blurring effect. With FidelityFX, we can get the best of both worlds.  

By making FidelityFX Open Source, AMD has done a service to all gamers. Consoles can use this, PCs can use this, and even platforms that use competing (non-Radeon) graphics hardware can use this. FidelityFX isn’t an AMD-only feature, and better still, it comes with practically no performance downsides. Framerate differences sit well within the margin of error when FidelityFX is enabled. 

(FidelityFX Off VS FidelityFX On)

 
Sometimes, the impact of FidelityFX is subtle. Below you may not notice how FidelityFX impacts Shadow of the Tomb Raider’s visuals with a quick glance. Even so, there are several minor visual enhancements, and these quickly add up to create a better-looking Shadow of the Tomb Raider gaming experience. 

As you have seen on page 1 of this FidelityFX analysis, FidelityFX can have a huge impact on Shadow of the Tomb Raider’s graphical clarity, which is amazing given the feature’s non-existent performance cost. 

Today, FidelityFX has been added to Gears 5, F1 2019, Borderlands 3, Rage 2, Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, and, of course, Shadow of the Tomb Raider. In all of these games, FidelityFX has a notable impact on each game’s visuals, a practically non-existant impact on framerates and seemingly no graphical downsides. Given this track record, all we can say is that we want to see FidelityFX in more games. 

Kudos to Eidos Montreal for bringing AMD’s FidelityFX to Shadow of the Tomb Raider over a year after the game’s launch. It is a great addition to the game, and we hope to see it within some of their future PC releases. 

(FidelityFX Off VS FidelityFX On)  

 
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