Introduction

Dead Island 2 is out now on PC after almost 10 years of development and the game releases in a very polished state on PC, which is quite rare these days, this release also has support for AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.2 (FSR 2.2). Unfortunately, there is no official support for NVIDIA’s DLSS Super Resolution or NVIDIA’s Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing (DLAA), so FSR 2.2 is the only available option for upscaling. In order to run this game at maximum graphics settings and reasonable framerates at native resolution, quite a powerful GPU is required, which is why upscaling solutions are so important. But depending on the game, there are subtle differences in the implementation of AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.2 (FSR 2.2), so we are keen to have a look at FSR 2.2 in this game.

Below, you will find comparison screenshots at 4K, 1440p, 1080p, and in different FSR 2.2 quality modes; the TAA screenshots are also available in the dropdown menu. For those who want to see how FSR 2.2 perform in motion, watch our side-by-side comparison video. The video can help uncover issues like shimmering or temporal instability, which are not visible in the screenshots.

All tests were made using a GeForce RTX 4080 GPU at Ultra graphics settings; motion blur and depth of field were disabled for better image viewing.

Screenshots

Side-by-Side Comparison Video

Conclusion

In Dead Island 2, the in-game TAA solution does not use any sharpening filters in the render path at all and does not have the ability to enable it from the menu. However, the FSR 2.2 implementation uses a sharpening filter in the render path without the ability to tweak the sharpening values through a sharpening slider, it is set to the low value by the developers, which might be even unnoticeable in some sequences of the game, especially at higher resolutions, and the sharpening filter does not cause any negative side effects or artifacts during gameplay.

Speaking of image quality, compared to native TAA, FSR 2.2 image quality is a very noticeable upgrade across all resolutions. The in-game TAA solution has a very blurry overall image across all resolutions except 4K, and very poor rendering of small objects detail—thin steel objects and power lines, tree leaves, and vegetation in general. Also, the in-game TAA solution has very noticeable shimmering issues on the whole image, even when standing still, and it is especially visible at lower resolutions like 1080p, for example. All of these issues with the in-game TAA solution were resolved with FSR 2.2 enabled due to better quality of the built-in anti-aliasing solution in the FSR 2.2 render path. With FSR 2.2 you can expect an improved level of detail rendered in vegetation and tree leaves in comparison to the in-game TAA solution, and small details in the distance, such as wires or thin steel objects, are rendered more correctly and completely in all Quality modes, the shimmering issues are greatly reduced, but still visible at lower resolutions, such as 1080p FSR 2.2 Quality mode.

In terms of performance, the FSR 2.2 implemenation have issues with performance degradation in some specific scenarios, and at 1080p and 1440p FSR 2.2, the performance decrease is most noticeable. It’s not an error on our end, but due to the FSR 2.2 implementation in this game. The first thing you might think of with these results is that it’s just a CPU bottleneck, but that is not the case, or at least not completely. The issue with decreased performance is only present during gameplay and if the framerate is close to 150 or above at the title screen or pause menu, which still renders the game in the background in real time, FSR works as intended with accurate performance gains. It’s important to note that a GTX 1060 or RX 580, for example, most likely won’t be affected by these performance reduction issues due to the generally much lower GPU performance. We are still unsure about what exactly is causing these performance issues, we suspect the developers implemented the FSR 2.2 render path itself incorrectly.