There are quite a few in the industry who are excited about the potential of FidelityFX Super Resolution, AMD’s supersamling tech, and with its launch on the horizon and the tech also confirmed for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, questions about what sort of an impact it’s going to have are being asked by many quite frequently.
Recently, we posed that question to Tomas Sala, solo developer of The Falconeer, whose response was as multifaceted as it was interesting. According to Sala, FSR is going to have a variety of applications, and how developers choose to use it will depend on what their artistic vision is, and what sort of an experience they’re looking to craft.
“It’s a tough one,” Sala said when asked about how Super Resolution on the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S will help developers. “And I think lots of gamers would love to see a single answer, some sort of template of what next-gen is. But clearly each developer will have artistic and technical reasons for say going for 4k60 or 30fps or doing 1800p60 with new tech to upscale. It is really about what works per game, and developers will have another option with Super Resolution. I think a fair number will decide to use it, so they can spend that GPU power on pushing the graphical envelope forward to its breaking limit. Some might use and still decide to hit 30 fps or sub 4k, just to enable worlds that push nearly generational limits. I think all of this makes this generation of consoles really quite exciting.”
Sala went on to add that more than anything else, what’s defining hardware this generation – including AMD’s FSR tech – is the way developers are being allowed to fulfil their artistic visions with fewer limits.
“In general, on the comparisons between hardware this generation, I think it is about removing limits for developers and artists to create,” he said. “I’m one guy at the intersection of generations making an open world air combat game, there’s studios with 20 people doing mind bogglingly beautiful open world games or recreating entire galaxies. For me the hardware and tech becomes less and less relevant, the limits are being removed, the walls broken down, that’s what’s important. And you can see how different platforms are fostering different kinds of creativity and such a huge variety of scales, and heck that’s exciting.”
FidelityFX Super Resolution is launching on June 22. While not much is known right now about what we can expect to see from the tech on consoles, Microsoft recently said that they would have updates to share on that “soon”, so hopefully, we won’t have to wait too long for those details.
Tomas Sala’s The Falconeer is currently available on Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC. The Falconeer: Warrior Edition is launching for PS5, PS4, and Nintendo Switch on August 5.
Our full interview with Sala will be live soon, so stay tuned for that.