God of War with FSR 2.0: field test and comparison with DLSS

After Deathloop and Farming Simulator 2022, AMD’s new upsampling process FSR 2.0 is now also available in God of War. This is quite remarkable, because God of War is based on Direct X 11(.1), for which AMD’s temporal upsampling (at least so far) does not offer any advertised support. But perhaps not all of our readers are too surprised, as there have been some striking indications in the recent past that, in retrospect, seem a bit suspicious.

In March, with the update to game version 1.09, an option for “AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0” appeared in God of War’s graphics menu – but at that time it was only FSR 1.0, the purely spatial, not the technically much more advanced temporal FSR 2.0. But was it really just a typo? In a recent interview we held, AMD hinted that developers of DirectX 11 titles could contact AMD for support regarding FSR 2.0 integration. The developers responsible for the PC port also repeatedly emphasized an exchange with AMD and the graphics card manufacturer has already used God of War several times Marketing material. It’s official since version 1.12: God of War (PC) supports FSR 2.0 – time for an analysis.

God of War now with FSR 2.0

In the current game version, the God of War now supports FSR 2.0, DLSS and its own temporal upsampling process, which is based on the game’s TAA. FSR 1.0 was removed with the retirement of version 2.0. Apart from the higher performance compared to FSR 2.0, the (technically fundamentally different) predecessor doesn’t offer much that players should miss anyway. The implementation of FSR 2.0 was successful in principle, but we noticed a few weak points. The developers may be able to improve these, but it may also be a technical limitation to a certain extent, after all the PC version of God of War still uses Direct X 11. However, DLSS does not show the same anomalies – albeit a few different ones – so we would assume that the cause is not primarily to be found in the interface.

God of War – New Upsampling Options (1)

Source: PC Games Hardware






FSR 2.0 is integrated into God of War in the form of the quality levels already known from DLSS – Quality, Balanced and Performance. The optional extreme setting “Ultra Performance” is also available for both upsampling processes. A bit irritating: the options are in the wrong order in the options menu, the first level in DLSS is the lowest quality with ultra performance, while in FSR 2.0 it is quality, the highest level. But we don’t want to dwell on questions of style. The TAA upsampling becomes active when you operate the resolution scaling. God of War on the PC does not offer an option for dynamic upsampling. Both DLSS and FSR 2.0 offer their own sharpness control, which you can use to spice up the image according to your personal taste – more on that in a moment.

Background: FSR 2.0

Although the similarity in name suggests a certain technical proximity, FSR 2.0 has relatively little to do with its predecessor, FSR 1.0. The upscaling techniques are conceptually similar – a low resolution is upscaled to a higher one. The image is filtered to prevent gross scaling artifacts – under the hood, however, FSR 2.0 has little in common with FSR 1.0, in fact, according to AMD, FSR 2.0 was developed from scratch. Perhaps the most important innovation in FSR 2.0 is that the new upsampling process now works temporally and no longer purely spatially. But this is only part of the innovations. From here on we refer to AMD’s review guide, but rather to the detailed and insightful GDC presentation, which we would like to recommend to interested parties who want to take a closer look at AMD’s new upsampling technology. We summarize the most important points for you below.

Even if FSR (buy now €19.89) 2.0 is a completely new technology compared to FSR 1.0 and achieves significantly better results, the actual image processing, i.e. the upscaling of the color buffer, works in FSR 2.0 in a relatively similar way to that in FSR 1.0. The extrapolation is done using Lanczos filters. AMD’s Robust Contrast-Adaptive Sharpening (rCAS) is also offered, but with FSR 2.0 you can use the slider to adjust the sharpness to your own requirements. FSR 2.0 also doesn’t rely on machine learning like its DLSS competitor, so it doesn’t require any special hardware and runs on graphics cards (and consoles) from any manufacturer. As with FSR 1.0, AMD has also decided to make the technology publicly available in open source form. But that’s where the similarities end, because apart from a few filters, broad accessibility and the basic idea of ​​saving performance by extrapolating the image content, FSR 1.0 differs significantly from FSR 2.0 – both technically and in terms of the end result.

AMD FSR 2.0 – GDC Slides – Conclusion

Source: AMD

FSR 1.0 is dependent on the anti-aliasing built into the game. If a title has good anti-aliasing, FSR 1.0 can also achieve better results than with a bad TAA, which is blurred and tends to form artifacts. If a game has no anti-aliasing (which can be used for FSR 1.0), anti-aliasing must also be implemented in the game for AMD upsampling, which in turn is time-consuming for the developer and would negate one of the greatest advantages of FSR 1.0 – the simple one Implementation and the hitherto high and fast adaptation rate of the technology that has been promoted as a result.

Without a temporal approach, the upsampling quality is only a mathematical function of the resolution: the higher the original resolution from which the image is extrapolated, the better the end result. FSR 2.0 addresses many of these pain points. One of the most important means against this is that FSR 2.0 now works temporally, i.e. integrates the information of several images into the calculation, brings a TAA with it and thus integrates temporal supersampling. For temporal supersampling, AMD uses jittering with FSR 2.0, so the image is rendered with a minimal offset (often in the subpixel range) from frame to frame. In this way, for example, additional information can be obtained from two slightly different images of the same scene, which otherwise could not be captured, particularly very fine details. The jittering also makes it easier to capture and smooth out non-moving elements, such as the edge of a wall. With FSR 2.0, the image quality no longer only depends on the original resolution, but also, like the competitor DLSS, on the number of frames calculated and the information gained from them. FSR 1.0 was relatively simple, FSR 2.0 is quite complex. The latter is one reason why FSR 2.0 now requires significantly more input from the developers and is also a little more demanding, since part of the performance gained through the reduced resolution has to be used again for temporal image processing.