AMD teases next-gen AI upscaling technology, could use AI in new FSR to combat NVIDIA DLSS

AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution was originally released back in 2021, allowing NVIDIA an entire two years on the market as the AI upscaler of choice for GeForce RTX series GPU owners... and now the company looks to be shifting into AI-powered upscaling in the future.

In the latest episode of No Priors, AMD CTO Mark Papermaster talked about 2024 being a "giant year" for the company, because they've spent many years on their hardware and software capabilities for AI. AI is now spread out across AMD's entire portfolio of products: cloud, edge, PC, and embedded devices and gaming products.

Papermaster said: "We are enabling our gaming devices to upscale using AI and 2024 is a really huge deployment year". Papermaster didn't specify if this means AI is coming to FSR, but if it did, it would make FSR a much better comparison against NVIDIA DLSS and Intel XeSS upscaling methods.

NVIDIA and Intel both use hardware on the GPU for upscaling, while AMD chose the open-source route with FSR which is why FSR works on non-Radeon GPUs. But now that AMD is talking about AI used for upscaling, the tease of FSR getting AI upgrades as we ramp up into RDNA 4 is a little exciting.

It also brings around the question of AI upscaling on Sony's next-generation PlayStation 6 console, which according to the latest leaks, AMD won the contract to build the chip for the PS6. Now we have a few years to wait for that, because the beefed-up PlayStation 5 Pro gets released this year.

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AMD CTO Mark Papermaster said: "2024 for us is a huge year because we have spent so many years developing hardware and software capabilities for AI. We've just completed AI enabling our entire portfolios so cloud, edge, PCs, our embedded devices, our gaming devices, we're enabling our gaming devices to upscale using AI and 2024 is really a huge deployment year for us so now the bedrock's there, the capabilities are there".