AMD FSR 3 Is Coming to Consoles, Potentially Unlocking New Performance Levels, Though PS5 May Have a Problem
Yesterday, AMD FSR 3 debuted on PC with the implementations in Square Enix's Forspoken and EA's Immortals of Aveum.
The frame generation technology offers great performance boosts in both games, surpassing even DLSS 3's average FPS in a direct comparison conducted on the latter game, though it is more prone to stuttering than NVIDIA's AI-based technology.
However, it won't be just PCs benefitting from FSR 3. AMD had announced it would support consoles back at Gamescom, but the question was whether it'd be beneficial enough for console games that developers would actually opt to use it. You see, AMD itself recommends a specific use case for the technology: pre-interpolation, post-upscaling frame rate should run at a minimum of 60FPS, with AMD FSR 3 bumping that up to 120FPS.
As gamers know very well, some console games are limited to 30FPS, though more and more titles allow users to target higher frame rates in so-called Performance modes.
Now, Immortals of Aveum developer Ascendant Studios has officially confirmed it is working to implement AMD FSR 3 on consoles, too. Here's the tidbit from the latest newsletter released a few hours ago.
In games that already hit the 60FPS target in their Performance modes, FSR 3 could allow up to 120FPS performance, which anyone could enjoy using an HDMI 2.1 display. On the other hand, it may not be able to work its magic with games limited to 30FPS like Gotham Knights, Redfall, and Starfield.
A technical caveat might be an extra obstacle to AMD FSR 3 implementation on PlayStation 5. FSR 3 uses a DX12-based replacement swapchain that handles the Optical Flow and Frame Generation workloads asynchronously. As explained in this GPU Open blog post, the Unreal Engine 5 plugin does offer an alternative option for non-Windows platforms, but that option (an RHI backend) does not work asynchronously and will, therefore, offer inferior performance.
With the Unreal Engine 5 plugin, there are more options to provide a starting point for supporting non-Windows platforms and that control frame pacing. The AMD FSR 3 UE5 plugin contains two backend types: RHI and Native DirectX 12.
The RHI backend is platform agnostic and should work effectively in most circumstances. However, it does not support asynchronous execution of the AMD FSR 3 compute workloads, so these jobs are serialized, with an associated performance cost. Additionally, frame pacing is handled by Unreal’s underlying presentation framework. The ideal use for AMD FSR 3 using the RHI backend is when VSync is enabled on a high-refresh 120+ Hz monitor.
The Native DX12 backend fully supports asynchronous workloads and full frame pacing, so it can have higher performance in certain circumstances.
It sounds like Xbox may have an edge when it comes to AMD FSR 3 implementations, at least for the time being. Regardless, it's exciting to see the first studio confirming its intention to bring the technology to consoles. We'll make inquiries to discover whether more studios will take the same step.
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