AMD’s Chief Technology Officer, Mark Papermaster, has announced the development of a new upscaling technology that integrates artificial intelligence (AI), marking a shift from AMD’s previous non-AI FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) technology. Unlike its previous approach, this new development aligns AMD more closely with competitors such as NVIDIA and Intel, who already use AI in their upscaling technologies. The inclusion of AI accelerators in AMD’s Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs and Ryzen 7000 series CPUs, which have seen widespread adoption, reflects AMD’s move towards AI integration in its upcoming FSR technology version.
Papermaster discussed AMD’s strategic emphasis on AI integration across its product lines in 2024, including cloud services, edge devices, PCs, embedded systems, and gaming consoles. This direction builds on AMD’s previous efforts to support AI at the Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) level in its Ryzen 7000 desktop and EPYC “Genoa” server processors, and the launch of Ryzen 7040 and 8040 series mobile processors with Neural Processing Units (NPUs) for enhanced AI tasks. The Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs featuring AI accelerators and the introduction of the Ryzen AI stack for Windows PCs are part of AMD’s broader initiative to incorporate AI into its offerings.
In essence, AMD is advancing a new AI-integrated version of its FSR upscaling technology, signaling a strategic pivot towards broader AI integration within its hardware offerings, with key developments anticipated in 2024.
AMD’s CTO: “We’re enabling our gaming devices to upscale using AI”.
It’s the tiniest of teases and opens up a whole trunk full of questions, but in a recent online interview, Mark Papermaster was asked what the year has in store for AMD. The CTO’s response was all focused on AI, naturally, but he also mentioned a curious little tidbit: its gaming devices are to get AI-based upscaling and 2024 is likely to be the year we’ll see it.
AMD’s position and thoughts on machine learning, cloud computing, and other big-money sectors are the main focus of the discussion with No Priors on YouTube channel Videocardz. It’s a good chat between the hosts and Papermaster, although it can be a little dry if you’re not interested in those specific topics.
However, the CTO’s closing remarks on AMD’s plans for 2024 are certainly of interest to gamers, all thanks to the brief comment on how the chip giant is bringing AI upscaling to its gaming devices.
“Well, this for us is a huge year because we have spent so many years developing our hardware and software capabilities for AI,” Papermaster begins. “We’ve just completed AI enabling our entire portfolio: Cloud, edge, PCs, 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.”
At the moment, AI upscaling is the preserve of Intel and Nvidia. Both companies use a two-stage upscaling process, where the first step is to run an image scaler using shaders to change the rendered frame’s resolution to the level of the monitor’s resolution. The second step involves the application of a neural network to tidy up the image, removing any glitches created by the upscaling process.
The mathematical operations involved to do this can be run on shaders but in the case of DLSS and the Intel Arc-only version of XeSS, it’s handled by dedicated matrix units in the GPU to get the best performance and visual results. The graphics chips used in AMD’s Radeon models perform all calculations via the Compute Units (CU), hence why FSR does not involve an AI step to optimize the images.
However, one interpretation of Papermaster’s comment is that the next graphics architecture, RDNA 4, could have a discrete matrix unit in each CU and if so, that could be used to handle the AI upscaling. An alternate view is that AMD has developed a relatively lightweight neural network that’s handled by the CUs and can be used as an additional step in the FSR pipeline to improve visual quality.
FSR and DLSS are performing roughly the same, but the latter has the advantage in graphical fidelity. Depending on the game, it can be significantly better, but it’s very subjective during gameplay.
If AI upscaling gets implemented into FSR in such a way that any GPU can do it (as long as it supports the relevant matrix instructions), then one could expect the quality to certainly improve, but the performance will likely take a dip.
It’s the way that Papermaster says ‘gaming devices’ that makes me suspect that AMD’s AI upscaling is most likely to be done this way. If it was just for RDNA 4, you would expect him to mention this or, at the very least, talk about GPUs specifically.
FSR can be supported by all gaming devices, including current Radeon cards and APUs in handheld PCs and consoles. If it turns out that it will require dedicated matrix units, as DLSS does, then it will only be supported on AMD’s next GPU architecture and won’t be anything to shout about for the Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5.
RDNA 4, no matter what its AI abilities are like, will be competing against Intel’s Battlemage and Nvidia’s Blackwell at some point in 2024, and these companies already have AI-powered upscaling.
AMD is joining the party in a fashionably late manner, but it could steal the limelight if it can offer better upscaling that all GPUs can use. Papermaster is certainly right about one thing: 2024 is going to be a huge year for AI and GPUs.
