AMD’s Latest Radeon Adrenalin 2020 21.6.1 Driver Will Support FSR ‘FidelityFX Super Resolution’

It didn’t take AMD long to produce and release the official FSR driver, with Radeon Adrenalin 2020 21.6.1 offering support for a variety of games that were leaked early last week. Adrenalin 2020 21.6.1 is now ready for download at the following link, however, the question surrounding what games will be supported still remains.

Luckily, AMD has also published details of that as well. Let’s take a closer look.

What Games Will Adrenalin 2020 21.6.1 Support?

The hugely anticipated FSR ‘FidelityFX Super Resolution’ feature has been floating around for some time now, however, bringing it to gamers has been a slower-than-normal process. For those unaware, FSR is AMD’s answer to NVIDIA’s DLSS ‘deep learning super sampling’ – a feature that allows better performance at higher screen resolutions.

The new FSR technology will become available on the following products:

• AMD Radeon RX 6000
• AMD Radeon RX 5000
• RX VEGA Series
• AMD Radeon RX 500/ 500X Series
• AMD Radeon Pro Duo
• AMD Radeon RX 400 Series

 

So, if you have any of the above products, you’ll theoretically be able to download Adrenalin 2020 21.6.1 and see what performance gains you can achieve as of today.

AMD FSR vs NVIDIA DLSS

It’s no secret that NVIDIA still has a massive edge with its DLSS feature, being adopted on a much larger scale and (seemingly) offering greater levels of performance and image quality results when compared. However, what makes AMD’s solution so great is its ability to be versatile – supporting not only the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series cards but older offerings to (all the way down to Polaris RX 400 series). Furthermore, FidelityFX Super Resolution will also offer support for NVIDIA’s own GeForce 10 (Pascal) Graphics cards.

All being said, FSR is still extremely new – and support is very limited. However, with the latest Adrenalin release, the following games will be able to utilize the technology:

• Anno 1800
• Evil Genius 2
• Godfall
• KingShunt
• Terminator Resistance
• The Riftbraker
• 22 Racing Series

 

Whilst this list isn’t overly impressive, we can expect further games to become available in the near future. Here’s a selection of games that will support the FSR driver:

• Asterigos
• Baldur’s Gate III
• DOTA 2
• Edge of Eternity
• FarCry 6
• Farming Simulator 22
• Forspoken
• Myst
• Necromunda: Hired Gun
• Resident Evil Village
• Swordsman Remake
• Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodhunt

 

That’s a good selection of games that will likely support the feature within the coming months. Expect that list to grow as well, as more games developers jump on board.

As far as release notes go, below is AMD has posted on its website regarding support, bug fixes, and known issues:

“Support For

• AMD Radeon™ RX 6800M Graphics
• Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance™
• AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) support for select titles.
  • Learn more from AMD here.

Fixed Issues

• Radeon FreeSync™ may intermittently become locked while on desktop after performing task switching between extended and primary displays upon closing a game, causing poor performance or stuttering.
• Anno 1800™ may crash upon launching this game when running DirectX®12.
• AMD cleanup utility may clean up chipset/RAID installer related folders/registries from the system.
• Some Radeon Graphics products may experience lower than expected performance in Destiny 2™ when compared to previous Radeon Software versions.
• Upon joining the AMD User Experience Program, the AMD User Experience Program Master service may have higher than expected CPU utilization.
• Enabling Ray Tracing while running Ring of Elysium™ on DirectX®12 may cause this game to crash.

Known Issues

• Resident Evil Village™ may experience an intermittent application hang or TDR on AMD Radeon VII graphics products in the first mission of the game.
• Enhanced Sync may cause a black screen to occur when enabled on some games and system configurations. Any users who may be experiencing issues with Enhanced Sync enabled should disable it as a temporary workaround.
• Connecting two displays with large differences in resolution/refresh rates may cause flickering on Radeon RX Vega series graphics products.
• An Oculus service error may be received on Radeon RX 5000 & 6000 series graphics products which prevents the Oculus Link setup software from running.
• Radeon performance metrics and logging features may intermittently report extremely high and incorrect memory clock values.
• If Ryzen Master is not detected in Adrenalin software after installation, a system restart may be required.
• If Blue or Black screen is observed in mobile systems, temporarily disable Enhanced sign-in
• A driver mismatch error may appear when two versions of Radeon software (Windows Store & AMD Support versions) are installed on your system. As a temporary workaround, launch the Windows Store version of Radeon software.
• AMD is investigating an issue that may cause a small impact on battery life on AMD Ryzen 5000 notebooks.
• A Blue or Black screen may be observed after updating to the latest Radeon Software. A workaround is to disable core isolation.
• AMD is investigating a D3 error code that may be seen in some motherboards after updating to the latest Radeon Software.
• Lower than expected performance may be observed on select AMD Athlon™ mobile systems.”

AMD FSR Performance

During the AMD Computex 2021 keynote, the team showcased the performance advantages of FidelityFX Super Resolution via Godfall – utilizing an RX 6800 XT and running the game in 4K native resolution on the EPIC preset (with RTX enabled).

By using the various FSR quality settings, below are the performance differences when prioritizing image quality over performance modes:

• Native 4K: 49 FPS
• FSR Ultra Mode: 78 FPS
• FSR Quality Mode: 99 FPS
• FSR Balanced Mode: 120 FPS
• FSR Performance Mode: 150 FPS

To further show off the potential of this new GPU feature, AMD then ran an interesting comparison utilizing an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card.

Below is a side-by-side comparison running Godfall in 1440p in the EPIC preset:

As you can see from the slides above (taken from the Computex keynote), the performance gains available when using FSR are quite dramatic. The feature comes with a variety of quality modes, all of which offer up a unique balance of performance and image quality. When using Ultra Quality mode, the RX Radeon 6800 XT was able to push around 60% more frames when in the exact same scenario. On the other end of spectrum, gamers can opt for the ‘Performance’ mode, which, in Godfall, offered up an almost 300% increase in frames per second – an incredible achievement when comparing the visual fidelity of both modes.

The GTX 1060 comparison wasn’t as impressive but still yielded good gains when ran at 1440p in the EPIC graphics preset. As you can see, whilst using the FSR feature, the GTX 1060 was able to push 41% additional frames on average – a real difference when it comes to overall fluidity and smoothness.

In addition to this list of games, AMD also confirmed that FidelityFX Super Resolution would be supported by 10 studios across a variety of engines and platforms – with more information launching in the coming weeks.

Below is the full, up to date list, of all the game developers who have pledged to support the technology in the coming months:

• ACME Gamestudio
• Bloober Team
• Crystal Dynamics
• Digital Sky
• Focus Home Interactive
• GOATI Entertainment
• Kobold
• Midgar Studio
• Nixxes
• Perfect World Games
• Rebellion
• Streum on Studio
• The Farm 51
• UMI Co. Ltd
• Vaki Games
• Ashar Studios
• Capcom
• Cyan Worlds
• Electronic Arts & Frostbite
• Gearbox Publishing
• Illfonic
• Larian Studios
• Movie Games
• Obsidian Entertainment
• Plastic
• Reflector Entertainment
• Superbright
• Turtle Rock Studios
• Unity
• Valve
• Avalanche Software
• Counterplay Games
• Destructive Creations
• EXOR Studios
• Giants Software
• Koch Media
• Luminous Productions
• My.Games
• Oxide Interactive
• QLOC
• Sharkmob
• Teyon
• Ubisoft
• Warner Bros. Games

How To Enable AMD FSR

If you want to enable AMD FSR in your games, take a quick gander at the below video which will take you through the simple process needed.