AMD's FSR 3 technology is finally available today on PC with its debut in Square Enix's Forspoken and EA's Immortals of Aveum. While the former game beat the latter to the punch by releasing the update earlier this morning, Immortals of Aveum is currently the only game where users can directly compare FSR 3 with DLSS 3 - the original frame generation technology released around a year ago by NVIDIA.
FSR 3 works in a similar way to DLSS 3, as explained by AMD in a new blog post published on GPU Open. Just like with NVIDIA's technology, the regular game frame input goes through an Optical Flow workload and a Frame Generation workload, the main difference being that NVIDIA's FG is based on a trained AI network. On the other, AMD relies on a DX12-based replacement swapchain that ultimately decides which frame to present to the user:
The final decision as to when “real” or “generated” frames are seen by the user is taken by our replacement swapchain implementation – which handles both the asynchronous compute dispatch of the Optical Flow and Frame Generation workloads. It also handles the pacing of frames, and ultimately sending images into the operating system for present on the display.
This difference may be important for the end result, as we'll see in a bit. First of all, the test configuration:
- AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090
- 32GB DDR5 6GHz
- WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe 1TB SSD
The big selling point of FSR 3 is that it'll work on competing hardware, too, such as NVIDIA's and Intel's graphics cards. To my surprise, AMD's frame generation technology actually runs faster than DLSS 3 in Immortals of Aveum even on an NVIDIA GPU, at least in the captured segment. The difference in average frames per second is pretty significant, too: the RTX 4090 averages 95 FPS with DLSS, while it breaks 110 FPS with FSR - a 16% improvement.
However, the average frame rate doesn't tell the whole story, as most gamers know all too well. Indeed, the capture shows DLSS 3 performing better in the low FPS figures. DLSS 3's 0.2% percentile FPS is actually higher than FSR 3's 1% percentile FPS.
In practice, FSR 3 stuttered a lot more when playing the game, making for a worse experience. Not that the game runs smoothly with DLSS 3 - as mentioned in previous reports, the game's performance is poor in any instance for such a high-end PC. FSR 3 fares worse in a direct comparison, though, and it may be due to NVIDIA's AI making smarter decisions than AMD's replacement swapchain as to when to display the real frame and the generated frame.
Of course, we'll need more tests in order to verify whether there is indeed such a pattern; it is possible this game's implementation of the new AMD technology does not work as intended and is destined to remain an isolated case. AMD should be commended for their achievement in terms of visual quality, though. I didn't notice any real difference between FSR 3 and DLSS 3 in this regard, at least in this instance.
One interesting tidbit is that Immortals of Aveum allows NVIDIA users to enable Reflex technology when FSR 3 is selected. This is great since, just like DLSS 3, FSR 3 inevitably increases latency due to its frame generation component. Radeon GPU users can mitigate that with AMD's Anti-Lag+ tech, but NVIDIA (and Intel) users cannot do that on their GPUs. Luckily, Reflex can easily replace it for games that support the feature, providing a relatively low-latency gaming environment.
As always, it's great to have more competition in this area. Frame Generation technology is important to achieve high frame rates with advanced rendering techniques (like Cyberpunk 2077's path tracing) and with complex simulations that make games CPU-bound. Thanks to the efforts of NVIDIA and AMD, it is likely that most games will feature one if not both technologies going forward.
However, games should be optimized regardless of any frame generation technology. Neither NVIDIA's DLSS 3 nor AMD's FSR 3 can save a game that performs poorly. On that note, Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum were probably far from the best choices to demonstrate a smooth experience.
There will be other, more significant tests coming up. The following games have been confirmed to receive FSR 3 support:
- Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
- Black Myth: Wukong
- Crimson Desert
- Cyberpunk 2077
- EVE Online
- Frostpunk 2
- Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
- Pax Dei
- Squad
- Starship Troopers: Extermination
- Warhammer 40K: Space Marine II
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