Image: Brad Chacos/Michael Crider/Foundry
The rivalry between Nvidia and AMD is never-ending, but new battle lines are forming around the companies’ competing approaches to frame generation tech. AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR3) recently went open source, allowing modders to add it into games that don’t natively support it. It turns out that this is a really good thing if you have a slightly older Nvidia card since FSR is platform-agnostic and better than earlier versions of Nvidia’s DLSS — DLSS 3 is exclusive to the RTX 40-series.
In one demonstration of Cyberpunk 2077 (spotted by VideoCardz.com), with an Nvidia RTX 3080 running AMD’s FSR3 via mods and most of the game’s punishing visuals set to their maximum, the native DLSS implementation handles the in-game benchmark at approximately 40 frames per second. The older, official FSR 2.2 can do about the same. Upgrading to the modded FSR3 build from LukeFZ can boost the framerate to a shocking 71 FPS, as measured by YouTuber Neegzm’s diagnostics.
It’s an impressive improvement, though not a perfect one. The uploader notes that actual gameplay shows notable instability and that the HUD elements flicker while playing. Even so, such results from an early build (only available to LukeFZ’s Patreon supports at the moment) are promising, especially for those of us with older hardware who feel a little left behind from the latest whiz-bang visuals.
WCCFTech managed to find at least one tool from a GitHub uploader, “Nukem9,” that’s both free and at least technically capable of being applied to any game that supports DLSS while running on an Nvidia GPU. Installation can be tricky and results spotty, but the initial improvements over official tools are impressive.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer
Michael is a former graphic designer who’s been building and tweaking desktop computers for longer than he cares to admit. His interests include folk music, football, science fiction, and salsa verde, in no particular order.
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