Will FSR 3.0 come to the Steam Deck?

So AMD has recently announced FSR 3.0 and many people have been asking me about it. What is it? How will it work? And will it come to the Steam Deck? Don’t worry. I’ve got you covered.

So, first of all, what is FSR and why is it important?

Well, FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) is an open source AMD technology that allows a game to render at a lower resolution and then scale it up to your screen’s native resolution. This is useful if you have low-powered graphics hardware and/or high resolution screens. This can be used to increase the framerate of a game, increase the resolution of a game, or reduce lag of a monitor running at a lower-than-native resolution. There’s lots of reasons you might want to use FSR.

On the Steam Deck, for example, FSR 1.0 is built in to the Deck’s performance menu toolset. FSR 1.0 is basically a scaling algorithm that used the information in the current frame to preserve detail. That’s great but could introduce scaling artifacts and jittery, unstable results. It was a great first attempt, but left a lot of room for improvement.

FSR 2.0, on the other hand, introduced temporal scaling. 2.0 brought with it sampling from previous frames in order to maintain consistent scaling over time. FSR 2.0 is a superior algorithm, though it does come with a few drawbacks. Not the least of which is that – unlike the first iteration of the technology – it’s not general purpose. Meaning games must specifically implement FSR 2.0 in order to use it. This explains why FSR 1.0 is available in the Deck’s performance menu but 2.0 is not.

That’s isn’t to say the Deck does not support version 2, though. It does. But only in the games that implement the 2.0 spec. And these games – titles like Deathloop, for example – do a great job with their implementation on Deck.

But now we come to FSR 3.0. This week, AMD officially introduced AMD at Game Developers Conference. While we don’t have answers to all our questions, we do have some key insights into the latest iteration of the tech.

First, AMD is aiming for a two-times performance increase over FSR 2.0. This is made possible by the introduction of interpolated frames.

And AMD is also putting a ton of effort into reducing latency.

Crucially, FSR 3 will be made available under the MIT license for developers to quickly adopt and include with their games.

The question is: will FSR 3.0 come to Deck? I think the answer, unequivocally, is “yes.” The Deck will end up supporting FSR 3.0 as soon as it’s available. But this will–in all likelihood–only be possible through games that support FSR 3. The performance menu probably won’t be getting a 3.0 option as this tech–much like version 2–will require games to specifically implement the scaling solution on their own.

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– Chapters –
00:00 – Introduction
00:23 – What is FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR)?
01:41 – FSR 1.0 vs 2.0
02:54 – FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.0
04:12 – FSR 3.0 will be licensed under the MIT license
04:44 – Will FSR 3 be supported on Steam Deck?

#steamdeck #fidelityfx #amd