Upcoming Steam Deck users rejoice! If Valve’s recent statements are true, AMD FSR upscaling technology will be supported on any game, regardless of developer support.
“FSR is already available for some applications that support it. Games that already include FSR will work as is, but also FSR support will be included as part of an OS future release. Once that happens, games could potentially make use of FSR even if the games themselves don’t natively support it,” says Steam in an FAQ update.
AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, or FSR for short, is a technique of upscaling lower resolution rendering into higher quality visuals through a two-pass algorithm, with minimum performance hit.
Of course, this is not by magic, which means there is a caveat. As you may have guessed or know, the FSR-produced image is not quite as good as native, but this does not mean it’s not worth doing. On the contrary, it gives you the possibility to run your games at or closer to your screen resolution (4K, for example) with framerates equivalent to what you get with a lower resolution.
The problem on PC is the lack of integration by game developer. We are sure everyone has a game that does not have FSR support.
With the integration of FSR directly into the Linux-based Steam OS, there’s less reason to worry about. This is especially useful for handhelds, where performance is limited by a lot of factors such as size, battery life and heat output.
On a side note, an equivalent feature is coming to PC in the form of driver-based upscaling Radeon Super Resolution, or RSR for short.
Back on track, Steam Deck users will surely appreciate the added speed, and hopefully the impact on image quality isn’t that bad, since the resolution games will run at to achieve playable frame rate may be intrinsically low.
In any case, more performance is always welcome, especially if it comes at no additional cost for the user. And if the quality isn’t to your liking, you will probably be able to disable the auto-FSR feature.
