AMD adds FSR driver support, discontinues support on older GPUs/OSes

[Bombastinator]

Dodged that bullet, barely

[mr moose]

2 hours ago, porina said:

If you try to play latest games, maybe you run into some support issue at some point, and that is when you might consider something newer.

 

 

Both of us (I'm on a 570) play latest release games too, we just don't play with all the settings maxed out, 1080 50fps is enough for us.  Hell, we aren't even bothered if there isn't any shadows or reflection detail.  I'm more concerned that his 5 year old card might need stupid work arounds to still work in the not so distant future.  

 

Also for the record I really hate waste, especially products that can still fulfill some sort of purpose but are no longer able to due to manufacturers decisions.  This is one of the reasons I despise apple, I have a perfectly good ipad that can no longer do any of the simple things it used to be able to do because apple decided not to update it.

 

 

 

 

[xAcid9]

8 hours ago, RejZoR said:

While ReShade could do it, it doesn't have control over framebuffer sizing. ReShade can only operate at resolution game is running where FSR changes (lowers) render resolution and outputs it to monitor's native resolution. Something ReShade can't do. Would be cool if it could do such things, people already do all sorts of funky thing with ReShade's shaders (best example is Marty's RTGI shader which adds screen space real time ray tracing to almost any game. I've used it for a while and it's pretty sick. Having RTGI and FSR and then CAS on top would be pretty sick

Oh man.. there goes my hope of FSR-ing Guild Wars 2 via DXVK+Reshade. 

 

Just tried Riftbreaker Demo. You can use FSR alongside RTGI + CAS via Reshade, just need to adjust the parameters to reduce flickering as usual.

https://imgsli.com/NTg1MTA

I didn't spend much time to makes it looks good though. 

8 hours ago, Ydfhlx said:

When people literally can't buy new supported one? It's literally the worst time for this support drop.

You still can use it. They dropped driver support for my laptop HD6770M 6 years ago but I can still play newer DX9/DX11 games.

[GamerDude]

9 hours ago, decolon said:

Hope that FSR can be quickly integrated into popular games with DLSS so we can get comparisons soon

I don't believe there's a need for that, other than to see performance uplift. DLSS2.0 and higher would have better image quality due to nVidia's more 'involved' method. FSR would have not comparable image quality to nVidia's DLSS tech is a given.

 

But, since it's not locked into any specific cards, many older GPU's, including GTX 1000/900 series cards can ride on this uplift in performance with FSR. nVidia has done absolutely nothing to help performance with their older cards, they simply want customers to buy RTX cards forget that the GTX line ever existed.

[Bombastinator]

39 minutes ago, GamerDude said:

I don't believe there's a need for that, other than to see performance uplift. DLSS2.0 and higher would have better image quality due to nVidia's more 'involved' method. FSR would have not comparable image quality to nVidia's DLSS tech is a given.

 

But, since it's not locked into any specific cards, many older GPU's, including GTX 1000/900 series cards can ride on this uplift in performance with FSR. nVidia has done absolutely nothing to help performance with their older cards, they simply want customers to buy RTX cards forget that the GTX line ever existed.

Apparently it is comparable.  It’s not as good but it’s comparable.  People are comparing it.  It’s not quite apples to apples because there are only a very few games that run each of them.  Sometimes not-as-good but easier to deal with wins.  Sometimes it doesn’t.  More often it doesn’t but it happens.  Betamax really was better than VHS.  VHS won though.  Gsynch is better than freesynch.  Freesynch is winning though.

DLSS seems to have an larger advantage at lower resolutions but FSR works.  It seems you can’t hit FSR quite as hard, but it’s simpler to implement and works on a whole lot more hardware.  AMD has won some and lost some with it’s me too stuff. This one looks like it might win.  Perhaps as big a win as freesynch.  Lower cost can make a big difference even if the competitor isn’t as good.  What may throw it over the top is FSR working on 1060s.  Look at the steam profile statistics.   There are a LOT of 1060s out there, and this gives em longer life.   This is how the Japanese beat the Germans in 35mm cameras.  They weren’t quite as good but they were fairly close and they were a lot cheaper. What I see happening is a lot of both, and some only one, until the next generation.  If one gets better and the other doesn’t it could push it over the edge.

[LAwLz]

8 hours ago, porina said:

To expand on the 5 years, that's roughly how long Polaris has been on sale. Unless you bought the older GPU after Polaris was released you could have had much longer support than 5 years. If you buy a product late in its life cycle you know you will end up with less supported time than someone who buys at launch. It isn't as bad as say an Android phone, but still happens. 

I don't follow your logic here.

If I bought for example the AMD Radeon R9 Fury at launch in July 2015, I would have gotten slightly less than 6 years of updates for that card. 

Polaris wasn't released until June 2016.

 

So if you wanted a graphics card between 2015 and 2016, you couldn't buy anything but the AMD graphics cards that are now being discontinued. 

You could have bought the latest and greatest graphics card AMD offered in 2016, and that card is now end of support about 5 years later. That's bad. 

 

In other words, AMD are only supporting cards that are 5 years old or newer right now.

This has nothing to do with "well you bought an old card". You could have bought a brand new, top of the line card 6 years ago and now won't have any support. That's a really short time. 

Meanwhile Nvidia just announced that they are dropping support for their 9 year old Kepler GPUs. But they aren't fully dropping support just yet. They will keep providing security updates for another 3 years. So Nvidia are offering 12 years of support for their GPUs and AMD are offering 6 years. That's a big difference.

 

8 hours ago, porina said:

Is it reasonable to expect a product to be supported by an operating system that didn't exist during its official sale life?

Yes, because that's how it's been most of the time for new versions of Windows.

 

8 hours ago, porina said:

Not all Win7 running systems could be upgraded to Win10.

Care to find me a Windows 7 system that only used PC parts released 2009 that could not run Windows 10?

I am pretty sure all system with a GTX 280 and a Core i5 could run Windows 10.

 

 

8 hours ago, mr moose said:

My son is running my old 380, it's is perfectly fine for all the games he plays (none of us are super high res gaming tech heads), Does this mean he will have to buy a new GPU soon simply because AMD don't want to keep basic support?

It depends. There is a risk he might have to upgrade to a newer graphics card, but it depends on how much Microsoft changes in Windows and how many workarounds exists.

 

If Microsoft changes the driver model then your son might need a new graphics card. If they don't then the older drivers should work fine.

If bugs in some particular game is found then it will most likely not be fixed and your son will need a new graphics card to enjoy that game. This depends on how many new games your son wants to play and how much driver optimization those games need.

If a serious security issue is found in the driver then you might not want to use the old GPU since it will be vulnerable. This is quite rare though. AMD have only had like one really big security vulnerability in their GPU driver in the last couple of years.

[Quartz11]

And here I am, still using an r9 290x that’s still running perfectly.  Does this end of support mean no security updates either, or should I continue updating the driver every time a new version is released, for whatever reason?

 

Someday I’ll upgrade when prices are back to reasonable.

[Mihle]

I think FSR might be great for me in some games, as I Iave 4k monitor and RX 5700 XT, having FSR on ultra quality would maybe be great, I haven't tested it personally.

[Bombastinator]

On one level the end of security updates makes sense because they’re not getting paid to do them.  There is an argument for figuring out a way to pay them though.  And perhaps finding out how much they would want.  It might be covered  by mere donations for example.  I just don’t know how much it costs.  The time of coders is expensive though. That the driver themselves are open source(?) helps.  If it’s more than donations do a Kickstarter or something.  Should be doable.  I assume AMD doesn’t mind being paid.

[porina]

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

I don't follow your logic here.

If I bought for example the AMD Radeon R9 Fury at launch in July 2015, I would have gotten slightly less than 6 years of updates for that card. 

Polaris wasn't released until June 2016.

I actually did buy a Fury X in August 2015. It was horrible and I RMA'd it. Replaced with 980 Ti which I still have.

 

Anyway, my point was, 5 years was the minimum case. The GPUs just made unsupported went back much further.

 

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

In other words, AMD are only supporting cards that are 5 years old or newer right now.

This has nothing to do with "well you bought an old card". You could have bought a brand new, top of the line card 6 years ago and now won't have any support. That's a really short time. 

What would be a reasonable amount of support time? Where do you draw the line?

 

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Meanwhile Nvidia just announced that they are dropping support for their 9 year old Kepler GPUs. But they aren't fully dropping support just yet. They will keep providing security updates for another 3 years. So Nvidia are offering 12 years of support for their GPUs and AMD are offering 6 years. That's a big difference.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of that distinction.

 

Would that be a more acceptable scenario if AMD were to only offer security related fixes for a while longer? So still no game bug fixes or feature support. I did have a look at AMD's statement again, and it doesn't sound like they will do anything more on the now unsupported products:

Quote

Beginning with the release of Radeon™ Software Adrenalin 21.6.1 today, we are moving the following graphics products to a legacy model, with no additional driver releases planned. Their final supported driver will be Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.5.2.

From: https://community.amd.com/t5/blogs/product-and-os-support-update-for-radeon-software-adrenalin-21-6/ba-p/477423

 

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Care to find me a Windows 7 system that only used PC parts released 2009 that could not run Windows 10?

I am pretty sure all system with a GTX 280 and a Core i5 could run Windows 10.

I didn't put in the time limit, but I get your point. I assume you picked that year because it is roughly the same minimum period of support before Win10 came out? The specific cases I've run into where Win10 will never run are on older CPUs lacking some required feature.

 

I think we also have to look at how big a change there is between Windows versions. XP was not much more than a reskin of 2000. Vista was a bigger jump from XP, and that had (lack of) driver issues on launch. 7 kinda followed on from Vista although maybe not a small or bigger jump. 8 and 10 have been relatively minor. If Win11 is not substantially different from Win10 then unsupported support could be inherited, but I wouldn't expect new drivers to be made for old products if it requires something much different.

[Stahlmann]

(Sorry if that has been posted here before)

 

If anyone cares about the general performance implications of FSR:

 

At 4K it is very effective in retaining image quality and granting a performance uplift between 30-40% when using "Ultra Quality" or "Quality".

Anything lower will look too bad to use.

 

At 1440p you can use "Ultra Quality" for a roughly 20-30% performance uplift and a minimal hit to picture quality.

Anything lower will look too bad to use.

 

At 1080p, don't use it. Everything below native will look noticeably worse and isn't recommended.

 

FSR is very effective at 4K when comparing the "Ultra Quality" and "Quality" presets with the "Quality" DLSS preset, but at 1440p and 1080p (target resolution) DLSS can do a much better job at retaining image quality when the render resolutions approach 720p or even lower.

 

(This is basically the information i gathered from in videos from Hardware Unboxed and Gamers Nexus so far.)

[mr moose]

3 hours ago, LAwLz said:

 

If Microsoft changes the driver model then your son might need a new graphics card. If they don't then the older drivers should work fine.

If bugs in some particular game is found then it will most likely not be fixed and your son will need a new graphics card to enjoy that game. This depends on how many new games your son wants to play and how much driver optimization those games need.

If a serious security issue is found in the driver then you might not want to use the old GPU since it will be vulnerable. This is quite rare though. AMD have only had like one really big security vulnerability in their GPU driver in the last couple of years.

 

It's almost amusing that historically I've had to update hardware (GPU/CPU) as it became obsolete so quick that some new games just couldn't be played, nowadays hardware remains usable for so long we have to start to think about the implications of companies not maintaining driver support.

 

but it makes sense really,  with older hardware still be usable 5-7 years later, it reduces the number of people willing/needing to buy a new GPU.  

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, porina said:

I actually did buy a Fury X in August 2015. It was horrible and I RMA'd it. Replaced with 980 Ti which I still have.

 

Anyway, my point was, 5 years was the minimum case. The GPUs just made unsupported went back much further.

Even if I were still using my 290X's, I still have them (friend is now using one of mine), I couldn't care less that they are "unsupported". They still work, will keep working, and will do so for years.

 

At work in a business context I'm strict about things being supported, at home for gaming if it works then I really don't care. So unless my 290X's actually stop working in Windows 7/10 for current and future games for no good reason (i.e. DirectX feature support they do not have) there is no impact for me.

 

The only thing that would stop me from using my 290X's is a clear and present, actively exploited, no mitigation possible security issue that AMD isn't going to fix. That's it.

 

P.S. My 8800 GTS still works and it's WAY unsupported.

[Spotty]

21 hours ago, xAcid9 said:

Written review for FSR. 
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-fsr-fidelityfx-super-resolution-quality-performance-benchmark/

Those sample images are really good to compare the different settings.

 

The Godfall sample is interesting. It seems FSR adds a bit of noise to the image. It's particularly noticeable around the stairs area. It seems the game is a little noisy in those areas with the lighting and FSR makes it worse.

Spoiler

Left Native, Right Performance

 

Left Native, Right Ultra Quality

 

 

But looking at the Kingshunt samples it looks pretty close at Balanced, and Ultra Quality actually looks better in my opinion. FSR is adding a lot of sharpness to the older graphics. Noticeable improvement in the bricks in the background, the shield and the clothing all looking more detailed.

 

Overall though it's pretty impressive, and the performance increase gained even from Ultra Quality is pretty significant. Would definitely give this a go with my 1080ti to see first hand how noticeable the quality drop is and the performance gain.

 

19 hours ago, porina said:

What we could use next is a FSR vs DLSS comparison. Does DLSS offer better visuals and/or more performance vs FSR for those with RTX GPUs.

Why not both? Use FSR to upscale from 1080p to 1440p then DLSS to upscale from 1440p to 4k. /s

[leadeater]

4 minutes ago, Spotty said:

Why not both? Use FSR to upscale from 1080p to 1440p then DLSS to upscale from 1440p to 4k. /s

I wonder if that is actually technically possible 

[Mark Kaine]

On 6/22/2021 at 12:42 PM, Morgan MLGman said:

No games actually support it yet, from what I've read all of the games "listed" as supported should receive game updates today or tomorrow to add the feature.

I read that its really simple to add and hope for community support / mods, also could be interesting for emulators maybe? 

Definitely curious how that develops and if its even possible…

 

I would love to try with my old 1060 to see how it works but most of the games im playing are older and probably wont be officially supported ever.

 

 

26 minutes ago, Spotty said:

Why not both? Use FSR to upscale from 1080p to 1440p then DLSS to upscale from 1440p to 4k. /s

No /s needed, thats precisely my plan! : D

 

21 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I wonder if that is actually technically possible 

Either it works or computer implodes is my guess.

 

 

[leadeater]

6 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

Either it works or computer implodes is my guess.

Sadly I have a feeling games will not let you do it, but I do hope we can.

[Spotty]

25 minutes ago, leadeater said:

I wonder if that is actually technically possible 

I think it will be one of two options. 1) it'll be like adding multiple passes of filtering/smoothing/sharpening effects, or 2) it will just amplify all of the noise generated from the first upscaled image and make it worse with lots of noise and artifacts - garbage in garbage out.

Probably won't be able to run both simultaneously though.

[xAcid9]

20 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

I read that its really simple to add and hope for community support / mods

One indie dev mentioned it took him 2 hours to integrate FSR into his game but another 4 hours for TAA rework. 

 

Game in question.

 

 

Also I just realize FSR support DX11, maybe porting to Reshade is do able?

Gonna check what Crosire and gang thought about that. 

 

AMD will release FSR source code in mid-July, hopefully it will start getting more traction after that. 

[KaitouX]

Don't know if someone already posted, but here is an AMD video on Forspoken saying it took one day to implement FSR in the game(around 1:10):

 

 

[porina]

41 minutes ago, Spotty said:

Why not both? Use FSR to upscale from 1080p to 1440p then DLSS to upscale from 1440p to 4k. /s

You remind me of something I'd like to try. Say you want 4k output, apply either FSR or DLSS to get up to 8k, then downsample to 4k. Would that look better than native 4k? Performance will be lower than native 4k due to the extra stages, but this could be a tradeoff for potential quality.

 

This is my attempt at achieving my goal that for best AA quality, where pretty much all practical implementations have obvious problems as a performance tradeoff. The solution that is guaranteed to work is native rendering at far above the output resolution (at least 2x) and downsample. Of course both FSR and DLSS are tricks that don't have that higher frequency information to start with so in theory it can't fix this directly, but maybe indirectly?

[LAwLz]

3 hours ago, porina said:

Anyway, my point was, 5 years was the minimum case. The GPUs just made unsupported went back much further.

Yeah but I don't see how that's relevant.

It's not like "well they gave the 7970 9 years of support" lessens the blow for 380 owners, right? Why should 380 owners care how long some older card got support? What matters to them is how long the card they own is supported.

 

I mean, if Samsung said "the Galaxy S10, S20 and S21 will stop getting updates tomorrow", it's not like we should just roll over and be happy with that because "yeah the S21 only got half a year of updates, but the S10 got almost 3 years so therefore Samsung's support is actually great!".

S21 owners (or Radeon 380 owners) doesn't give two shits about how long some other product got supported. It doesn't help their situation.

 

 

3 hours ago, porina said:

What would be a reasonable amount of support time? Where do you draw the line?

Not sure. The longer the better, and if your competitor is providing 12 years of updates then ~6 years is pretty bad. I would not have cared if it was 10 years of support. 10 vs 12 years of support is not that big of a difference when you're comparing brand A vs Brand B. But 6 vs 12 years is a significant difference.

 

3 hours ago, porina said:

Thanks, I wasn't aware of that distinction.

 

Would that be a more acceptable scenario if AMD were to only offer security related fixes for a while longer? So still no game bug fixes or feature support. I did have a look at AMD's statement again, and it doesn't sound like they will do anything more on the now unsupported products:

It would make the situation better if they kept providing security updates, but I'd still think their support was far inferior to what Nvidia has offered their customers and as a result I would not be very happy with these news.

You have to remember that these products do not exist in a vacuum. What AMD does will always be compared to what Nvidia does, and vice versa. It's the competitor that sets the bar for what is good/bad.

 

 

3 hours ago, porina said:

I didn't put in the time limit, but I get your point. I assume you picked that year because it is roughly the same minimum period of support before Win10 came out? The specific cases I've run into where Win10 will never run are on older CPUs lacking some required feature.

I picked that year because we're talking about AMD dropping support for 6 year old products, and since you brought up Windows 10 dropping support for some products I took the release date of Windows 10 (2015) and went back 6 years in time (2009) to see which products would have been dropped if other companies had as short support periods as AMD.

 

In any case, I think it's disappointing that AMD drop support for some of their products so quickly. I get why they are doing it but the really short support cycle compared to Nvidia, on top of doing it in the middle of a very serious global silicon shortage leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I am not affected and honestly I don't know anyone who is, but I did expect more from AMD.

[Kid.Lazer]

40 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

[...]

I think the biggest problem here is the apparent hypocrisy surrounding AMD's drivers. On one hand, they get tons of flak for having poor drivers and the classic "AMD fine wine" driver optimizations. Then everyone turns around and wants them to support every card, no matter how different the architecture, for umpteen years. Compared to Nvidia, their budget is a fraction of a fraction. In light of that, you can't have it both ways. So pick one: do you want new, forward-seeking features, or long-term-yet-stagnant "support"?

[leadeater]

6 minutes ago, Kid.Lazer said:

I think the biggest problem here is the apparent hypocrisy surrounding AMD's drivers. On one hand, they get tons of flak for having poor drivers and the classic "AMD fine wine" driver optimizations. Then everyone turns around and wants them to support every card, no matter how different the architecture, for umpteen years. Compared to Nvidia, their budget is a fraction of a fraction. In light of that, you can't have it both ways. So pick one: do you want new, forward-seeking features, or long-term-yet-stagnant "support"?

Part of AMD's problem is they use all sorts of architectures within product generations so they can't just say for example all GCN 2.0 and older cards are now legacy as even RX 500 has GCN 1.0 cards in that lineup, where the main architecture for RX 500 series was GCN 4.0. 

 

Nvidia on the other hand don't do that, GTX 10 series is Pascal and every single product within that generation has a Pascal architecture. Nvidia may however choose give certain particular cards an extended life span but those are typically very low end model for OEM or such needs. The last mixed architecure generation on desktop was GTX 700 series, GTX 900 series had 2 very low end mobile models that were Kepler rather than Maxwell.

[RejZoR]

12 hours ago, xAcid9 said:

Oh man.. there goes my hope of FSR-ing Guild Wars 2 via DXVK+Reshade. 

 

Just tried Riftbreaker Demo. You can use FSR alongside RTGI + CAS via Reshade, just need to adjust the parameters to reduce flickering as usual.

https://imgsli.com/NTg1MTA

I didn't spend much time to makes it looks good though. 

You still can use it. They dropped driver support for my laptop HD6770M 6 years ago but I can still play newer DX9/DX11 games.

I've done some wild thing with NVIDIA too in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. It didn't allow usage of DLSS at 1080p so I used DSR to upscale image to 1440p and then decrease it with DLSS again. Just because I wanted to see it working lol. I later bought 1440p monitor (not because of this) and I could use DLSS by default.