[IrishWhiskey]

AMD is paving the way for its technology to become mainstream on gaming consoles. Starting with Xbox Series S and X, which are both powered by AMD Zen2 processors and RDNA2 graphics, developers will now be able to use AMD's open-source collection of FidelityFX technologies, such as Image Sharpening, Variable Shading or ray traced shadow Denoiser.

Starting from today, AMD FidelityFX is now available in the latest Xbox Series X|S Game Development Kit (GDK)

For those not aware AMD as part of their GPU Open initiative has a series of open source libraries that developers can use for certain features in their games/engines. https://gpuopen.com/

https://gpuopen.com/gsl-2021-xbox/

This news makes it even easier than before to write cross-platform games, with developers able to access select AMD FidelityFX effects with specific optimizations for Windows® and Xbox. Game developers can now utilize further platform-specific optimizations with AMD FidelityFX, straight from the Xbox Series X|S Game Development Kit.

This development is very exciting to all at AMD who have worked to deliver these effects into the hands of even more developers – and we will continue to strive for our highly optimized effects to be at the forefront of cross-platform game development.

Xbox Game Developers interested in getting started with AMD FidelityFX can do so with the latest Game Development Kit (GDK), where samples for Contrast Adaptive Sharpening, Variable Shading, and Raytraced Shadow Denoiser technologies are available.

Up to now these technologies have only been available to developers in the PC space and were not available on consoles. This seems to be changing now as AMD look to partnering more closely with console manufacturers to push their technologies and offering these to developers to enhance their games.

AMD is set to launch their DLSS competitor titled "FidelityFX Super Resolution" or FSR for short some time this year. This will be a part of the FidelityFX software suite/libraries and it seems this move to integrate FidelityFX with consoles could have big benefits to performance if FSR ends up being a solid solution.

If previous news and statements from AMD are to be believed, AMD are looking to make their tech as cross platform as possible and looking to enable it on both consoles as they move forwards so Playstation 5 owners should not feel left out as I believe these features will be enabled in due time on PS5 too.

According to RedGamingTech developers who have spoken to him have confirmed that the FidelityFX software suite will become available on PS5 too.

 

[regawdless]

Hoping for good results regarding their super resolution. Would be great for the consoles.

That standard fidelity fx stuff is not anything to write home about though.

 

[IrishWhiskey]

Hoping for good results regarding their super resolution. Would be great for the consoles.

That standard fidelity fx stuff is not anything to write home about though.

I'm not a game developer so I can't speak to these solutions directly but my understanding was that these were pretty good solutions/handy features that developers can use as an out of the box solution. Granted if the company is a huge developer with tons of resources then maybe they will be happy creating their own solutions and maybe those could better suit the title being developed but as far as I know these libraries are pretty solid especially for developers who either don't have the resources or are trying to save time/money.

To the best of my knowledge AMD created these as an open source counter to Nvidia's GameWorks libraries which as we saw tons of developers used to save time/money even if the solution was kind of terrible/tanked performance such as HairWorks etc...

As for the actual quality of the features their TressFX hair simulations seem to be well regarded as is their CAS and SSAO. I think they have some physics stuff in there as well that is supposed to be solid and an alternative to PhysX but I haven't really looked into that much and am not sure if it is part of FidelityFX or just a part of the overall OpenGPU initiative so I can't say for sure.

Either way, getting some handy time saving features of (reportedly) solid quality is definitely better than not having them I think, especially for smaller or time constrained developers.

As for FSR itself, who knows, it could end up being terrible and end up being a tick box to compete with Nvidia and not well regarded. I mean this will be their first iteration and as we all know it took a while for DLSS to get where it is now. Having said that knowing that they are competing with DLSS2.0+ I would hope they wouldn't half ass it and would come out the gate with something solid from the get go. DLSS is really shaping up to be a great feature garnering more and more support in engines and praise from gamers/tech press where you lose only a bit of quality but can gain a ton of performance so AMD really need to knock it out of the park with FSR if they want to compete.

I think integrating with consoles is smart move to improve adoption/branding automatically as developers may build it into their engines for consoles and simply port over to PC. But we will have to see what happens, Nvidia really did a great job with DLSS so they deserve some serious kudos there. The ball is in AMD's court now to respond with FSR so lets hope it is not DOA.