The technologies that make up the AMD FidelityFX ecosystem are now available in the Xbox Series S and Xbox Series S development tools, which means developers can access them now and start taking full advantage of the potential offered by both consoles.
As many of our readers will know, AMD FidelityFX is also available on PC. If we join the arrival of this platform to the announcement of DirectX 12 Agility we see that Xbox and PC are getting closer, although we must not forget that all the features of AMD FidelityFX were already available in Windows 10 and that its integration in the Xbox X Series and S Series development kits marks an important step forward in the development of better optimized next-generation games, and with higher graphics quality.
In the attached image we can see a simplified breakdown with the most important technologies that AMD FidelityFX integrates, among which we can highlight:
- AMD FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS), an algorithm that adaptively adjusts the degree of sharpness per pixel in the image. It can improve image quality when working with certain edge smoothing techniques, such as TAA, for example.
- AMD FidelityFX Variable Shading (VS), a variable-rate shader that adjusts shading quality on a scene-by-scene basis, thereby reducing workload and improving performance without major sacrifices in image quality.
- AMD FidelityFX Denoiser, which reduces noise generated in ray-tracing workloads. This step is typically the last in the hierarchy that occurs when generating a ray-traced frame.
We still have no details on when AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution will be available, a long-awaited technology that is set to become the great rival to NVIDIA’s DLSS 2.0, and could mark a major turning point in current-generation console performance, provided it is truly on par with NVIDIA’s alternative, and that the implementation is done optimally.
Why hasn’t PS5 received AMD FidelityFX?
We don’t have an official explanation, and in fact, everything seems to indicate that it is unlikely that this set of technologies will end up coming to PS5. We understand that many will tell me that Sony will use their alternatives and that in the end there will be no problem for the end-user. We hope so, as we will end up buying a PS5 sooner or later, but unfortunately, we have such an optimistic feeling.
Microsoft was very clear on this. The company delayed Xbox S and X Series to fully support the new technologies and features of the RDNA 2 architecture. This confirmed, on the one hand, what we had been saying about PS5, that it was a console whose GPU did not really use the RDNA 2 architecture, as it lacked some of its features, and on the other hand, it also suggested that the superiority of Xbox X Series would go beyond raw power.
Xbox Series X is the most powerful console out there, and right now it offers the most support for advanced technologies. With the current state of generational transition we are in, the differences all this may make are small, but when real next-gen games start to be developed, and we see Xbox X Series exclusives, we will realize that the gap between the two was not as small as some would have us believe.
