AMD Has Retired the FidelityFX Branding and Announced the FSR Redstone Update
AMD is getting rather swanky with its words for PC gamers. The long name FidelityFX Super Resolution has been duly dumped, and the technology will henceforth simply be called FSR. The driver-level feature formerly called Fluid Motion Frames (FMF) has been renamed FSR Frame Generation.
The Arrival of FSR Redstone
Beyond just some nomenclature changes is the confirmation that AMD's next big tech suite, code-named Redstone, will officially release on December 10. Four technologies will feature in this suite designed to modernize rendering, especially in ray traced environments
- FSR 4 Upscaling Already seen in some shipped titles.
- FSR Frame Generation AI frame-generation tech (formerly FMF).
- FSR Ray Regeneration A denoising technology meant to compete with Nvidia's Ray Reconstruction.
- FSR Radiance Caching A new feature that uses neural networks to predict light propagation in a scene.
The Ray Tracing and AI Focus
The Redstone update showcases the industry's shift towards fully path-traced graphics. Ray Regeneration and Radiance Caching are tailored to lift the computational burden of ray tracing. The upcoming hardware generation is expected to mostly lean toward path tracing, and AI-based shortcuts are starting to become critical in approximating high-tier lighting effects without tanking performance.
FSR Ray Regeneration has already been shown in early previews from Call of Duty Black Ops 7. Early rundown rematches show that while the output differs a lot from Nvidia's DLSS Ray Reconstruction, it provides more of a different approach than being clearly better or worse.
Implementation Workings
While the December 10 launch will hold, game users must be aware that FSR Redstone remains largely reliant on developer implementation. This entails the integration of Ray Regeneration and Radiance Caching into the game engines by studios rather than the simple toggling offered by the driver with FMF and FSR 4 upscaling integration. However, FSR 4 upscaling could still be driver-toggled for older FSR 3 games.
