Introduction

AMD has finally released their newest version of FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR 3), which contains support for the AMD Fluid Motion Frames technology (AFMF), AKA Frame Generation, Super Resolution upscaling technology and “Native AA” (Native Anti-Aliasing) quality mode that runs games at native resolution without upscaling, similarly to NVIDIA’s DLAA. FSR 3 Frame Generation runs using async compute, meaning the cost will be variable depending on how much async compute is already being used by the game. It is an open technology that does not require machine learning (ML) hardware, allowing it to be supported on a broad range of products and platforms, including consoles. When using FSR 3 Frame Generation AMD recommends the following hardware: AMD Radeon RX 5000 Series and above or NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 Series and above. AMD does not suggest using FSR 3 Frame Generation on products older than their recommendations, because how FSR 3 Frame Generation performs will depend on the capabilities of your GPU and on older hardware you may not have an optimal experience and may see little to no improvement in performance.

Below, you will find comparison screenshots at 4K, 1440p, 1080p, and in different FSR and DLSS quality modes; the TAA, native FSR 3 and FSR 3 Frame Generation screenshots are also available in the dropdown menu. For those who want to see how these technologies 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 3080 GPU at Ultra High graphics settings with ray tracing disabled; motion blur, depth of field and film grain were disabled for better image viewing. DLSS Super Resolution in this game shipped with version 2.4.12.

Screenshots

Side-by-Side Comparison Video

Conclusion

On day one, Forspoken had official support for NVIDIA’s DLSS Super Resolution, Intel’s Xe Super Sampling (for Intel’s GPUs only), and AMD’s FSR 2.1, and the latest update for the game brings official support for FSR 3 Frame Generation only, so unfortunately we don’t have the ability to directly compare AMD’s Frame Generation solution to the DLSS 3 Frame Generation counterpart from NVIDIA. However, even without a direct comparison, we spotted several major differences between these technologies.

The first major difference is in the requirements for additional VRAM when FSR 3 Frame Generation is active. AMD’s Frame Generation solution requires a smaller amount of VRAM for activation: around 200 MB at 1080p, around 300 MB at 1440p and around 500 MB at 4K resolution. For comparison, DLSS Frame Generation requires around 600 MB of additional VRAM at 1080p, around 1 GB at 1440p and around 2 GB at 4K resolution.

The second most noticeable difference is in the extra steps needed in order to properly apply AMD’s FSR 3 Frame Generation. When using DLSS Frame Generation you can just toggle the feature on and you are ready to go without any issues under the hood, so no extra steps needed. If you try to do the same with AMD’s Frame Generation solution, you’ll get an unstable frame pacing with constant stuttering even at high framerates, which will result in a very sluggish and stuttery experience. In order to avoid these issues, it is highly recommended to turn on Vsync and set a custom framerate limit a few frames below your monitors refresh rate, for example 58 FPS for 60 Hz or 142 FPS for 144 Hz. It is important to not hit the limit of your monitor’s refresh rate to avoid an additional 30% of input latency increase from enabling Vsync. Also, FSR 3 Frame Generation in the current state does not work properly with Variable Refresh Rate (VRR), G-Sync or Freesync technologies.

Speaking of input latency, AMD’s FSR 3 Frame Generation has certain requirements for the base framerate in order to receive a smooth and responsive gaming experience. AMD recommends to have a base framerate of at least 60 FPS (just like NVIDIA DLSS Frame Generation). For the game-independendent AMD Fluid Motion Frames technology, AMD recommends to have at least 70 FPS before enabling. We’ve tested the input latency using two different scenarios: 30 FPS of base framerate, which achieves 60 FPS using FSR 3 Frame Generation, which is not a recommended use-case, and 70 FPS of base framerate with 140 FPS using FSR 3 Frame Generation, which has a bit of extra frames, so your dips in busy fights don’t drop below 60. In the first scenario you’ll get the input latency of around 35 FPS with the smoothness of 60 FPS, which felt very slow and sluggish, especially when rapidly moving the camera, and in the second scenario you’ll get the input latency of around 80 FPS with the smoothness of 140 FPS, which was a much better experience in terms of overall responsiveness. It still doesn’t feel like playing at native 140 FPS (which is expceted). It is important to note that AMD has its own latency reduction feature called “Anti-Lag+,” which is only available for the RX 7000 series GPUs, and thus wasn’t applied in our testing as we’re using a NVIDIA RTX 3080 GPU.

In Forspoken, the FSR 3 and DLSS implementations provide a sharpening filter in the render path with the ability to tweak the sharpening values through a slider. By default, the game sets the sharpening values at 80 for each upscaling solution, which will look oversharpened even at 4K resolution. During this round of testing we used a balanced setting of 50 for all sharpening filter values.

Speaking of image quality, it is important to note that in order to use AMD’s Frame Generation solution, the Super Resolution upscaling component is required. Unfortunately, the image quality of the Super Resolution component isn’t improved with the third version of FSR, and the game is still essentially using FSR 2 for upscaling, which, as we have tested numerous times, has major instabilities in motion, especially at lower resolutions. Forspoken in particular is a fast paced action game with a lot of small particle effects on screen during combat and the FSR upscaling solution just fails to render these details, producing a very blurry, pixelated and aliased image in motion, especially at 1080p and 1440p resolutions. Also, the FSR upscaling has very noticeable disocclusion artifacts around main character. Because the Super Resolution upscaling component is required for Frame Generation to work—all of these image quality issues are transformed into generated frames and they are even more noticeable when Frame Generation is enabled, creating an even more unstable image in motion. However, there is a “Native AA” mode available in the FSR 3 quality settings, which runs the Super Resolution technology without its upscaling component, similarly to NVIDIA’s DLAA, but with a higher performance cost in comparison to the native TAA solution. With native FSR enabled, the overall image is sharper, but still has shimmering issues, disocclusion artifacts and pixelated particle effects, they are just a bit less visible. On the good side, AMD’s Frame Generation solution does not have any issues with the in-game on-screen UI, the area where DLSS Frame Generation often has issues.

For those who have been wondering if it’s possible to combine DLSS Super Resolution with AMD’s FSR 3 Frame Generation technology, the answer is simple—you can’t enable NVIDIA DLSS and AMD’s Frame Generation at the same time in this game. And that’s somewhat disappointing, because with DLSS enabled the overall quality of generated frames would have been significantly improved.

Speaking of performance, with FSR upscaling in Quality mode and FSR 3 Frame Generation enabled, you can expect doubled performance across all resolutions compared to native rendering. What’s also important to note is that just like NVIDIA’s Frame Generation solution, AMD’s Frame Generation also has the ability to bypass CPU limitations and increase the framerate in CPU limited scenarios. Enabling “Native AA” quality mode does come at a performance cost of about 10% compared to the TAA solution, however.