Discussing DLSS 2.3 vs FSR 2.0, Hopper, Lovelace, RDNA 3 with Bryan Heemskerk

Hey guys, What are your thoughts on zen 4 specifically supporting pcie 5.0? As time goes on do you think the probability of zen4 having pcie 5.0 has increased or decreased? On another note, what’s up with thunderbolt still only using pcie 3.0? As a continuation to my last question, it seems as though there is a high chance that all major platforms will be using pcie 5 at the end of this year, however thunderbolt will still be using a 2 generation old bus. Although it’s reasonable to expect a pcie to thunderbolt delay, this seems particularly long. In your eyes, what’s been the driving factor behind this? Cheers, Doron

Doron Loula

Hello Tom and Bryan, with so much being devoted to DLSS, FSR / RSR and upscaling, especially for less impact by ray tracing it seems, which is easier to program for RT or the "pre-baked" lighting in games? Is there a reason for the down scaling / up scaling software offered by DLSS etc. over a software like Sapphire's Trixx? As a Sapphire GPU owner, if I want a bit more frame rate, I can pop in to Trixx, drop the render of my 1440p monitor to 95% or 90% then with Radeon image sharpening have a completely adequate and smooth gaming experience with a boost to frame rate. Is there a need for the software based scaling effects vs what is more or less hardware based?

Sarcastro

Hi Tom and Bryan, while DLSS, soon XeSS, and to a lesser extent FSR are the hot topic right now, are you able to say if upcoming games would be able to use hardware "neural engines" to accelerate in-house engine solutions, or would a developer be better off implementing the IHV's general purpose scalers? For a follow-up, are there other data structures that could be accelerated with "neural engines."

Gach

People keep mentioning how switch successor can rely on DLSS to make up for its weaker specs compared to current gen consoles. But I'm here doubting how good could it even be? I ask this DLSS works best when resolution is already high so it feels like it probably won't help as much as everyone hopes it do it? Like I don't think it would do 1080p to upscaled 4k. What about you guys?How do you think they'll use DLSS?

Falto

With more than 2 times density compared to TSMC 7 nm and Samsung 8 nm, do you think that we will get an incredibly good line-up for laptop GPUs from both AMD and NVidia when they will use the 5 nm family process? What is the energy efficiency improvement you expect? Can we get 3070 desktop or better performance around 100 W?

Silvannos

Quoting from AMD's FSR 2.0 announcement: "FSR 2.0 supports Dynamic Resolution Scaling too, where the input resolution to upscale from is determined (and dynamically adjusted) by the minimum framerate you want to always achieve in the game. Developers also have the option of applying RCAS sharpening to the output too." Speaking as a user, this sounds like a great option - choose your desired output resolution and FPS and let the GPU sort out the rest. What do you think?

Chris Rijk

Hi Bryan, I’m curious if your team is talking about or planning for optimizing for the Steam Deck at all? (Patreon ate half my question, not sure if you’ll see but editing to add it back) Are you personally interested in it? Tom isn’t super excited about it, but I think it’ll be really cool to be able to play games from my very large backlog of steam games on the train or even just lying on my back on the couch, which the switch lets me do and I love, but switch ports are usually more expensive and run worse.

Alexander

Hi Tom and Bryan, I just watched Nvidia's GTC keynote, Hopper announcement was fine, but what caught my attention was the new NVlink4 and NVlink C-to-C, could this be Nvidia's infinity fabric? any thoughts?

when you revisit the rx 6500xt with FSR 2.0 etc. does that change anything? In Germany it seems like right after the anouncement sells on mindfactory.de (biggest PC Hardware online shop here) jumped. Prices since then went up by 15%. They were around 200 euro and now 230 on average.

chippi

Hey Tom and Bryan, Bryan congrats on the promotion, your episode with Tom inspired me to take courses for game design and computer science (a passion in my life since I could remember, just never acted on it) so thank you. My question is this...from an art direction perspective do you make assets any differently with FSR, DLSS or XeSS in mind as the end result may vary from what was originally intended? Or is it something you just make the asset and if an upscaling technique is used you just let it do what it's gotta do with whatever artifacts appear? Bonus question if you can answer this: Do these upscaling techniques have an effect on a studio when they're in a planning stage for what might end up as recommended system specs? Example: RX 5700 might not give a stable 1440p60 without the aid of upscaling. Are specs recommended with no upscaling in mind? Thanks

CompressedAIBlocks

Good evening Tom and Bryan. With raster performance growing exponentially it seems with the latest architectures it still baffles me that this technology or method of upscaling (DLSS/FSR/XeSS) is just now being pushed. I get the idea that it makes RT easier to run but it seems we could have really used this concept around the late Kepler/GCN (the 28nm stagnation) gen and not now when is seems that “low end” cards will be completely capable of 1080p 90+hz (for reference I feel the 4050 will be around 3060ti/3070 performance and the 7500/xt around 6600xt/6700xt performance). Do you see this more of a big to do about nothing or is their a push from devs to have this upscaling tech available now because they want to push past current hardware limits?

Loophole35

Is there a way for FSR 2.0 to be as easy to add to games as the current FSR is? And how would you even approach injecting a temporal upscalers into a render pipeline not designed to have that upscaler - for example running the uoscaler externally, in a game independent and thus game agnostic way, on top of the game's own render pipeline? Maybe you could use driver and scheduler to "crowbar" FSR 2.0 into the game's pipeline as it is running?

KarbinCry