Ever since the RDNA based graphics cards were launched, AMD has been working on the software side of its GPU Eco-system. The Radeon Software Adrenaline 2020 Edition was one of the largest revamps of the control panel in years. Radeon Boost which is essentially a driver-centric implementation of motion-based dynamic resolution was one of the key features of that updates. Other notable features were Radeon Chill, Enhanced Sync, Anti-Lag, and Integer Scaling, all in one window.
It looks like Team Red is working on another major update to Radeon software, slated to land this spring. One of the primary additions will be the inclusion of the DLSS-alternative otherwise known as FidelityFX Super Resolution which will leverage the DirectML API to upscale the image with a minimal loss in quality. Unlike NVIDIA’s implementation, this is a software-based technique that only requires the presence of Microsoft’s DirectML API to work.
Although Super Resolution should work across all hardware including NVIDIA’s RTX graphics cards, it should run much faster on the Radeon RX 6000 lineup due to the massive L3 Infinity Cache present on the GPU die. It will also speed up the process by caching more and more data on-die as machine learning-based algorithms tend to be bandwidth-intensive.
As for Radeon Boost, the existing implementation basically improves performance by reducing the resolution of a game when there’s a lot of motion as most of the details are blurred either way. However, it suffers a notable loss in image quality when featuring static or slow-moving scenes where the drop in resolution is quite apparent.
The enhanced version of Radeon Boost improves the image-quality in static scenes by leveraging the new RB+ engine and utilizing VRS to distinguish between the parts of the frame which are stationary and excluding them from the algorithm.
