Topic on Glossary talk:Anti-aliasing (AA)

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) is not an anti-aliasing method and so as of right now does not belong on this page. The PCGW staff have yet decided how to handle that feature best.

Anyone wanting to know more about what FSR is and how it functions can read AMD's documentation on it: https://gpuopen.com/fidelityfx-superresolution/

Main takeaway from it though is:

- It's a spatial upscaler -- not an anti-aliasing method -- and requires being paired with a regular anti-aliasing method such as TAA or MSAA. Otherwise the high-res images it produces would be aliased to hell, since FSR itself does not perform any form of anti-aliasing on its own.

- It works by taking the current low-resolution anti-aliased frame (anti-aliased using TAA or MSAA or other common technique) and upscales it to display resolution.

- It's composed of two passes:

a) An upscaling pass called EASU (Edge-Adaptive Spatial Upsampling) that also performs edge reconstruction.

b) A sharpening pass called RCAS (Robust Contrast-Adaptive Sharpening) that extracts pixel detail in the upscaled image.

Was FSR added to this page? I didn't even notice. And yes I agree, it shouldn't be here.

As a side note, how would you note FSR support in an article? Under what section and where? Since it doesn't fall into any traditional categories (like AA).

> Was FSR added to this page?

Yeah, it was added by another user since, well, we really don't have any other place to document it atm... 😩

> As a side note, how would you note FSR support in an article? Under what section and where?

No idea yet... The staff have discussed possibly adding another row to better cover "internal resolution"/"upscalers" or something like that, but we keep running into overlap with the AA row since internal resolution sliders that supports higher than 100% is basically supersampling, and DLSS and TAAU and other reconstruction algorithms usually combines AA in their process (FSR is an outlier in that regard since it doesn't).

So if you have any ideas or suggestions yourself I would gladly hear them.

Hmm, probably nothing better than the other people in the Discord. Maybe just a note in the 4k ultra HD section (I've added it to Necromunda just to see what it could look like, feel free to update or remove once a proper solution is found), and a separate glossary page for FSR only?

Unless other "upscalers" become common in games, I don't think it's worth creating an entirely separate page for upscalers alone. Currently it's bilinear or FSR as far as I know, not including upscalers with an anti-aliasing effect. Perhaps if a seperate "upscalers" page is created, I think just a mention of the upscaling part of those techniques would be acceptable.

As I side note, almost every UE4 game has support for temporal upscaling, but nothing about it is on the article or wiki. Many UE4 games could have TAAU "hacked" in but this information is not found in PCGW or often even online, which is a waste considering I have had great results in making 70% of 4k look native with TAAU and some sharpening. If upscaling is given a separate place, TAAU (and DLSS) should be included with it in my opinion, considering upscaling is a larger part of those techniques then anti-aliasing is.

A minor update regarding FSR 2.0.

The above thread only concerns FSR 1.0, which relied on the game performing anti-aliasing before sending the input frame for upscaling by the FSR 1.0 algorithm.

FSR 2.0 on the other hand works on aliased input, and performs anti-aliasing as part of the algorithm, similar to TAAU and DLSS.

To quote AMD:

• FSR 2 uses cutting-edge temporal algorithms to reconstruct fine geometric and texture detail, producing anti-aliased output from aliased input.