Our First Look At FSR 4? AMD's New AI Upscaling Tech Is Impressive!

so my friend and colleague Alex battalia and I came in with some significant expectations coming into CES because there was a general expectation that AMD Advanced Micro Devices would reveal a variety of products including their new rdna 4 gpus and FSR 4 and indeed it seems to be the case that some journalists were actually briefed on those subjects before AMD abruptly decided to did not showcase those products in a 45-minute presentation claiming that there were some timing issues but AMD actually did showcase some of those Technologies at CES but in a somewhat slightly sneaky fashion that certainly surprised Alex and I so Alex can you lay out the general situation that we encountered yesterday afternoon about 2: p. m. in the venian hotel in Las Vegas can you lay that out for me can you explain exactly what happened yeah what surprised us so much well basically we went into the AMD booth there which isn't a booth it was actually a sweet section of the hotel itself in the conference area uh with little to no expectation what we would see there because we knew that they kind of abruptly didn't actually say too much about rdna for gpus or any of the technology behind FSR 4 Beyond saying that that exists and that they'll talk about at a later point in the quarter uh so we went in there with little to no expectations and we walked in and actually we didn't think that we were going to be seeing much of anything at all there was like a Black Ops stand and like you could see some like handheld stuff in the corner uh and the games were running but it was contextless we didn't actually know what was going on uh so I walked around and I looked for any people from AMD that I tend to know and I saw some people uh that I did know and I went over to them and talked to them and they're surprised to see me there and then they were like oh did you see this I'm like no what is this and he's like well this is a research project and lo and behold sitting side by side two pcs one running uh I don't know what card was in the the first PC but it was running FSR 3 on the left hand side and the 3.

1 oh 3. 1 sorry yeah because this is running in Ratchet and Clank uh you know Nixie software there and the right hand side was the research project which is in actuality presumably they didn't actually say it with any concrete words it is FSR 4 yes yeah but obviously a work in progress version of it so ml based uh upscaling on the right on the left the older analytic handt tuned one and basically the idea was there we Wen going to be getting b-roll from direct capture Oliver is walking right up to the screen there with cameras and uh recording things that we saw and we could basically just run through the first level of the game uh both both of them running in 4k performance mode uh on some pretty nice looking uh monitors actually and inside the PC itself that was on at least the right hand side I didn't look in the left hand side one was what is an engineering sample of the latest rdna A4 GPU which hasn't really been announced which is the RX 970 possibly the XT I don't yeah it's a little bit cuz we didn't get to see the front side of the card uh so it was just the back side uh which was labeled engineering sample so there's only so much we can say there but basically it was a and I say context list as the demo because there wasn't anyone there um usually when you go to like a new technology demonstration for a new product there's always a a technical rep next to the demo Booth or demo station describing what it is and walking you through it and maybe answering your questions but here there was no one there in like a an official capacity to stand there rather someone else introduced it to me and then just said like have fun at it yeah without much there were some hints like they're like well we're currently calling this our machine learning research preview and not FSR 4 but yeah basically the the gist here is that we're looking at amd's uh presumably Next Generation machine learning upscaling solution versus their old analytical upscaling solution yeah right and it it was presented in a very strange manner that certainly maybe suggests some background issues with I have no idea what it suggests but it was weird yeah exactly maybe this was scheduled and then maybe it was not scheduled something like that but I think the thing that really did stand out to me and Alex here and the thing that really did catch our attention out of this research preview is the fact that the research preview the research project seemed to have much better image quality than FSR 3. 1 which is a pretty established you know pretty credible looking analytical upscaler um on PC and on consoles and Ross a variety of image quality aspects I think this was actually outperforming it quite a bit yeah it definitely was so basically I've played the first level of rationing Clank more times than I would like to even talk about but uh I know exactly all the pain points for each and every upscaler in that first level so I wanted to walk through it and um kind of look and see exactly where they would compare against each other while walking between the FSR 3.

1 version and this uh research project which is presumably amd's FSR 4 and there was a couple ones that were easy to notice right away just in the first staging area for example um when walking along the carpet has a fine texture along it and uh all the upscales can kind of do this depending upon their input resolution and output resolution but avasar was the one that always had the most trouble here and basically if you look at that carpet uh with avasar 3. 1 you'll see like a moi pattern where it looks like a like a giant concentric ring uh surround each other on the the carpet there go over to the AMD research project SL FSR 4 not really there and one thing that needs to be said we're looking at offscreen footage here that Oliver did his best to capture while we're lining it up so you're also like zooming in on a pixelated screen with a camera with a limited resolution so there will be some other things here that may look like artifacting like it may look like marav and its own right on the right hand side but that is that was only captured in camera yeah it it's like it's like in person it looks very clean very smooth very stable and then you know you're really looking at the difference between those two because both of them obviously have some artifacts in the fact that we filmed it off screen and it's a little bit bizarre I'm sure that in a different world perhaps it might have been a smarter idea to actually Supply some direct feed capture footage of This research project because that might have shown it off in better light but you know we went in this is what they had to show us so this is what you get you offscreen footage of this AMD research project but I think in general I mean across a variety of image quality aspects like you pointed out the mo on the stairs no longer an issue also some issues with FSR 3. 1 with the ssao which does not really seem to be an issue at all with this research project yeah basically uh background objects with Sao maybe due to the Precision and internal resolution of the effect with FSR 3.

1 and Ratchet and Clank and presumably also in Spider-Man but I haven't looked at it in a while it's just like a thing that you'd imagine happens in the Insomniac engine it kind of like flickers you know a lot of ssao is actually done at Le like less than the screen resolution and then temporarily amortized over time the first title to do it was GES War I actually um and in this game at least look at background stuff especially stuff that's like flush light gray or white uh it'll actually like flicker in FSR 3. 1 and the research project version did not do that at all um another thing to just also generically comment on was the uh the kind of General sharpness of the image was uh rather High not in a negative fashion uh there was the game's internal sharpening filter which I eventually turned off I believe because I just wanted to see like the more raw output but one thing to comment on is I don't think it looked particularly soft or anything like that which is something like it is an image quality characteristic just a generic subjective appraisal there but it looked like sharp like they were trying to achieve an image that was sharp not necessarily filmic soft but like sharp yeah I think there were kind of two other key areas where it really differentiated itself in My View From fisar 3.