FSR explained: how AMD made upscaling mainstream

Why upscaling won (and why FSR mattered)

Raw rendering at native resolution is the cleanest story you can tell. It’s also the most expensive story you can ship.
Modern rendering stacks are hungry: physically based materials, volumetrics, ray tracing, deep post-processing, and enough
shaders to make your GPU look like it’s doing taxes.

Upscaling won because it’s the only lever that reliably moves both image quality and performance without redesigning your whole frame.
Reduce internal resolution, reconstruct the missing detail, and spend the saved budget elsewhere: better lighting, higher view distance,
more stable frame times. It is a compromise, but so is everything in production.

AMD made upscaling mainstream not because FSR was “the best” in every snapshot comparison, but because it was deployable.
It was open, cross-vendor, and didn’t demand a specific AI accelerator path. That meant studios could treat it like a feature,
not a partnership negotiation.

What “mainstream” actually means in operations terms

Mainstream means your feature becomes part of the default troubleshooting tree. It becomes something QA toggles,
something support asks about, and something performance budgets assume will be enabled on a large chunk of systems.
Mainstream also means you can’t treat it as “optional nice-to-have.” When it fails, it fails loudly.

If you run a live product, you already know the pattern: a new graphics feature ships; half your player base never touches it;
a quarter turns it on and is happy; a stubborn ten percent use it in weird combinations with overlays, capture tools, VRR modes,
and driver branches that were last updated during a previous administration. That ten percent is where your pager lives.

FSR 1, 2, 3: the family tree without marketing fog

FSR 1: spatial upscaling plus sharpening

FSR 1 is a spatial upscaler. It looks at a single frame and tries to upscale it using edge-aware logic, then applies sharpening
(RCAS) to counter blur. It doesn’t “know” motion. It doesn’t use history. It’s fast, simple, and easy to integrate.
It can also look like a very confident guess when the content is complex.

The operational upside is huge: fewer inputs, fewer integration landmines, fewer ways to be subtly wrong.
The downside is equally practical: you can only reconstruct so much from one frame. Fine detail at low input resolutions becomes
wishful thinking. A spatial upscaler can be stable or sharp, but it often struggles to be both.

FSR 2: temporal reconstruction (the grown-up version)

FSR 2 is temporal upscaling. It uses multiple frames, motion vectors, depth, and exposure information to reconstruct detail over time.
This is the “serious” category: it’s where quality jumps, and where integration mistakes become visible as ghosting, shimmering,
broken UI, or noisy disocclusion.

Temporal techniques are powerful because they harvest information from time. They are also fragile because time is where every
engine has its own sins: jitter patterns, TAA history handling, reactive masking, transparency, particles, and post effects that
were never designed to be “reprojected.”

FSR 3: frame generation enters the chat

FSR 3 adds frame generation (interpolation) plus anti-lag style latency management (depending on implementation).
It can dramatically increase displayed FPS by synthesizing intermediate frames from motion.
This is not the same thing as “more performance.” It’s more displayed frames; your simulation may still run at the old rate.

Frame generation is where you stop talking about average FPS and start talking about frame pacing, input latency, and artifacts
under rapid motion. It’s also where “my benchmark says 160 FPS” meets “why does it feel like 60?”

A short practical rule: if your base frame rate is unstable or low, frame generation can make the instability look smoother
while your input latency stays unimpressed.

How FSR works under the hood (what it needs, what it breaks)

Spatial vs temporal: the real difference

Spatial upscaling is a per-frame transformation. It sees pixels and edges. It does not have a memory.
That’s why it’s robust and why it can’t magically reconstruct subpixel detail.

Temporal upscaling treats the current frame as one sample in a time series. It assumes motion vectors are correct,
assumes depth is coherent, assumes jitter is known and consistent, and assumes your engine is giving it clean inputs.
When those assumptions hold, the result is impressive. When they don’t, the result is “why is my gun leaving a trail behind it?”

The inputs FSR 2-class temporal upscalers expect

• Motion vectors that represent the motion of pixels/geometry between frames.
• Depth buffer for disocclusion handling and reconstruction decisions.
• Jitter offset and consistent camera jitter pattern.
• Exposure / pre-exposure so history blending doesn’t explode on brightness changes.
• Reactive / transparency masks to reduce ghosting on particles, water, and UI-like elements.

Miss one of these, and you might still ship. You just ship a mystery.

Where integration tends to go wrong

The biggest failure mode is not “the algorithm is bad.” It’s “the inputs are lying.”
Motion vectors that don’t include animated skinned meshes. Vectors generated in a different space than expected.
Depth that’s post-processed or reversed without matching configuration.
Jitter applied to one pass but not the one feeding vectors.
UI drawn before upscaling and then treated like it’s part of the world.

Upscalers are like monitoring: they faithfully amplify whatever you give them, including your mistakes.

Sharpness: a quality knob that doubles as a customer complaint knob

Sharpening is seductive. It makes screenshots look crisp. It also makes motion shimmer, texture aliasing, and specular noise
more visible. Your best default sharpness is rarely “the sharpest one.” It’s the one that doesn’t turn foliage into a swarm of bees.

Joke #1: Turning sharpening to 100% is like yelling in a meeting—technically you’re clearer, but nobody’s happier.

Frame generation: why ops people should care

Frame generation changes the shape of complaints. You’ll see fewer “low FPS” tickets and more “feels laggy,”
“mouse is floaty,” and “weird artifacts when turning quickly.”
If you manage performance dashboards, you need to stop treating FPS as the single KPI. Start tracking:
99th percentile frame time, frame time variance, and latency markers.

One reliability quote that belongs in every performance review:
“Hope is not a strategy.” — General Gordon R. Sullivan

You don’t “hope” the engine feeds correct vectors. You verify it with capture tools and repeatable tests.

Practical benchmarking: measuring what players feel

Why average FPS is a trap

Average FPS is a mean value that hides the thing players actually perceive: inconsistency.
A game can average 120 FPS and still feel bad if it’s spiking frame times every few seconds.
Upscaling can raise the average while leaving spikes untouched because the spikes come from CPU stalls, shader compilation,
streaming, or synchronization points.

Benchmark like an SRE, not like a marketing slide

The loop is simple:
define workload → control variables → capture frame times → compare distributions → interpret the bottleneck.
If you can’t rerun the exact scene path, your benchmark is a vibe check, not data.

Make decisions based on:
median frame time, p95, p99, and p99.9 if you can.
Then validate with an input-latency measurement if you’re using frame generation.

Quality modes aren’t just “performance vs quality”

The classic modes (Quality, Balanced, Performance, Ultra Performance) are really different input resolutions and reconstruction
budgets. Dropping input resolution can expose issues:
thin geometry flicker, moiré patterns, aggressive LOD popping, specular aliasing.
Sometimes “Balanced” looks better than “Performance” not because the algorithm changes, but because the input stops starving it.

Decide what you are optimizing for

If you’re targeting 60 Hz TVs, you optimize for stability and consistent pacing.
If you’re targeting high-refresh esports monitors, you optimize for latency and minimal artifacts under fast motion.
FSR settings (and whether to use frame generation) should follow that decision, not the other way around.

Hands-on tasks: 12+ real commands, outputs, and decisions

These are practical tasks you can run on a Linux gaming/workstation box or a build/QA machine to diagnose GPU/CPU/driver and
pacing issues around upscaling. The goal isn’t to “prove FSR is good.” The goal is to find the constraint and fix the pipeline.

Task 1: Confirm GPU, driver, and kernel basics

cr0x@server:~$ uname -r
6.8.0-41-generic

What it means: Kernel version can affect scheduler behavior and GPU driver compatibility.

Decision: If you’re on an old LTS kernel with newer GPUs, test a newer kernel/driver stack before blaming FSR artifacts.

cr0x@server:~$ lspci -nn | grep -E "VGA|3D"
03:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Navi 22 [Radeon RX 6700 XT] [1002:73df]

What it means: Confirms the actual GPU model. This matters for feature support and expected performance.

Decision: Use this to bucket test machines; don’t compare results across different GPU tiers and call it “FSR variance.”

Task 2: Check the Mesa/driver versions (common silent culprit)

cr0x@server:~$ glxinfo -B | sed -n '1,25p'
name of display: :0
display: :0  screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
Extended renderer info (GLX_MESA_query_renderer):
    Vendor: AMD (0x1002)
    Device: AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT (radeonsi, navi22, LLVM 17.0.6, DRM 3.57, 6.8.0-41-generic) (0x73df)
    Version: 24.1.3
OpenGL version string: 4.6 (Compatibility Profile) Mesa 24.1.3

What it means: Identifies Mesa version and driver path. Many FSR complaints are driver regressions or shader compiler quirks.

Decision: If artifacts appear “after update,” pin or bisect Mesa/driver versions. Don’t tune sharpening to hide a regression.

Task 3: Verify Vulkan driver identity (FSR is often used in Vulkan titles)

cr0x@server:~$ vulkaninfo --summary | sed -n '1,40p'
VULKANINFO SUMMARY
==================
Instance Version: 1.3.283

Devices:
========
GPU0:
    apiVersion         = 1.3.280
    driverVersion      = 2.0.310
    vendorID           = 0x1002
    deviceID           = 0x73df
    deviceName         = AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT

What it means: Confirms Vulkan version and the device in use.

Decision: If you see the wrong GPU (iGPU), force the discrete GPU selection before investigating FSR quality/perf.

Task 4: Identify if you’re CPU-bound or GPU-bound at runtime

cr0x@server:~$ sudo apt-get install -y mangohud
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  mangohud
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 12 not upgraded.

What it means: MangoHud provides frame time graphs and GPU/CPU metrics overlay for Vulkan/OpenGL.

Decision: Use it to determine whether FSR (a GPU-side lever) can actually help your bottleneck.

cr0x@server:~$ mangohud --dlsym vkcube
MangoHud: Uploading is disabled (permit_upload = 0)

What it means: You can inject the overlay into a Vulkan app. In a game, you’d launch via Steam launch options similarly.

Decision: If GPU utilization is low while frame times are high, stop tweaking FSR first; you’re likely CPU/IO-limited.

Task 5: Capture frame pacing basics (present mode and refresh)

cr0x@server:~$ xrandr --verbose | sed -n '1,40p'
Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 2560 x 1440, maximum 32767 x 32767
DisplayPort-0 connected primary 2560x1440+0+0 (0x4a) normal (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 597mm x 336mm
	2560x1440     165.00*+  144.00    120.00    60.00

What it means: Shows refresh rate and current mode.

Decision: When evaluating FSR 3 frame generation, lock the test to a fixed refresh target (e.g., 120 Hz) to interpret pacing.

Task 6: Check CPU governor (the “why does it stutter on laptops” classic)

cr0x@server:~$ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor
powersave

What it means: CPU is prioritizing power saving; boost response can be slower, increasing frame time spikes.

Decision: Switch to performance for benchmarking; otherwise you’re measuring power policy, not upscaling.

cr0x@server:~$ sudo cpupower frequency-set -g performance
Setting cpu: 0
Setting cpu: 1
Setting cpu: 2
Setting cpu: 3

What it means: Sets performance governor for stable tests.

Decision: Re-run your capture after this change. If spikes reduce, document power policy as part of your repro steps.

Task 7: Confirm you’re not thermally throttling

cr0x@server:~$ sensors | sed -n '1,40p'
amdgpu-pci-0300
Adapter: PCI adapter
edge:         +76.0°C  (crit = +100.0°C, hyst = -273.1°C)
junction:      +92.0°C  (crit = +110.0°C, hyst = -273.1°C)

k10temp-pci-00c3
Adapter: PCI adapter
Tctl:         +83.5°C

What it means: High junction temps can induce GPU clock drops; CPU Tctl can throttle boost.

Decision: If clocks drop during heavy scenes, fix cooling or power limits before you judge FSR modes.

Task 8: Observe GPU clocks and utilization under load

cr0x@server:~$ sudo radeontop -d - -l 1 | head -n 10
Dumping to stdout
gpu 99.12%  ee 0.00%  vgt 92.45%  ta 88.12%  sx 61.33%  sh 97.44%  spi 72.88%  sc 55.11%
vram  512.00mb  gtt  238.00mb  mclk 2000.00MHz  sclk 2450.00MHz

What it means: GPU is near saturation; FSR (lower internal resolution) can help.

Decision: If GPU is pegged, test FSR Quality vs Balanced and compare p99 frame times, not just average FPS.

Task 9: Check VRAM pressure (stutter that looks like “FSR is broken”)

cr0x@server:~$ cat /proc/meminfo | grep -E "MemAvailable|SwapTotal|SwapFree"
MemAvailable:   11248320 kB
SwapTotal:       2097148 kB
SwapFree:        2097148 kB

What it means: System RAM availability is healthy; swap unused.

Decision: If MemAvailable is low and swap is in use, streaming stalls can dominate; reduce texture settings before blaming upscaling.

cr0x@server:~$ sudo cat /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/amdgpu_vram | head
VRAM total size: 12272 MiB
VRAM usable size: 12272 MiB
VRAM used: 10384 MiB

What it means: VRAM usage is high. Upscaling may reduce render target sizes, but textures and geometry still dominate.

Decision: If VRAM used is near total, reduce texture resolution or RT features; don’t expect FSR alone to fix hitching.

Task 10: Spot shader compilation or pipeline cache issues

cr0x@server:~$ journalctl --user -b | grep -iE "shader|pipeline|vulkan" | tail -n 10
Jan 13 09:11:22 desktop steam[4121]: Fossilize INFO: Using read-only directory: /home/cr0x/.steam/steam/steamapps/shadercache
Jan 13 09:11:29 desktop steam[4121]: Fossilize INFO: Processed 128 pipeline cache entries

What it means: Pipeline cache activity indicates shader compilation/pipeline creation is happening.

Decision: If stutter coincides with cache misses, warm caches in QA runs; don’t attribute first-run stutter to FSR quality modes.

Task 11: Measure disk IO latency (asset streaming bottlenecks)

cr0x@server:~$ iostat -xz 1 3
Linux 6.8.0-41-generic (desktop) 	01/13/2026 	_x86_64_	(16 CPU)

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
          12.31    0.00    3.10    2.55    0.00   82.04

Device            r/s     rkB/s   rrqm/s  %rrqm r_await rareq-sz     w/s     wkB/s   wrqm/s  %wrqm w_await wareq-sz  aqu-sz  %util
nvme0n1         85.00   9200.00     0.00   0.00    1.20   108.24   42.00   2100.00     5.00  10.64    3.80    50.00    0.30  22.00

What it means: r_await/w_await are low; disk isn’t the bottleneck here.

Decision: If await spikes (tens of ms) during hitching, solve IO/streaming first. Upscaling won’t fix a slow disk.

Task 12: Check for background CPU stealers and scheduling noise

cr0x@server:~$ top -b -n 1 | head -n 20
top - 09:22:10 up  2:11,  1 user,  load average: 3.02, 2.41, 2.12
Tasks: 356 total,   2 running, 354 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 11.3 us,  2.8 sy,  0.0 ni, 84.9 id,  0.8 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.2 si,  0.0 st
MiB Mem :  32036.7 total,  13420.2 free,  10412.1 used,   8204.4 buff/cache
MiB Swap:   2048.0 total,   2048.0 free,      0.0 used.  21624.6 avail Mem

  PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
 4121 cr0x      20   0 4102328 512844 142112 S   3.3   1.6   1:12.44 steam
 2210 cr0x      20   0  834520  94128  62152 S   2.7   0.3   0:33.10 chrome

What it means: Overall CPU is mostly idle; no obvious hogs. But browsers and overlays can still introduce jitter.

Decision: For clean repro, stop background apps and overlays. If the issue disappears, document the conflict rather than “FSR unstable.”

Task 13: Validate compositor/session type (Wayland/Xorg differences)

cr0x@server:~$ echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE
wayland

What it means: Session is Wayland. Some capture/overlay tools behave differently than on Xorg.

Decision: If frame pacing issues show only on one session type, reproduce on the other before changing in-game upscaling settings.

Task 14: Capture a simple baseline FPS and frame time metric using MangoHud logs

cr0x@server:~$ mangohud --output_folder /tmp/mhud --log_duration 30 --dlsym vkcube
MangoHud: writing output to /tmp/mhud

What it means: Creates a short run log in /tmp/mhud with frame time statistics.

Decision: Run once at native, once with FSR mode enabled (in your game). Compare p99 frame times to decide if the mode actually improves feel.

Joke #2: “It runs fine on my machine” is not a benchmark; it’s a personality trait.

Fast diagnosis playbook: find the bottleneck quickly

When a player says “FSR made it worse,” you need a triage path that doesn’t require a week of debating screenshots.
Here’s the order that saves time.

First: classify the complaint

• Blurry / smeared / soft → likely too low input resolution, sharpening off, or incorrect render scale.
• Ghosting / trails → likely bad motion vectors, missing reactive mask, or transparency issues.
• Shimmering / crawling edges → aliasing, over-sharpening, or unstable history/jitter.
• High FPS but feels laggy → frame generation without latency management, CPU-bound base frame, VRR mismatch.
• Stutters / hitches → streaming, shader compilation, VRAM pressure, background tasks, power policy.

Second: decide if you’re GPU-bound

Upscaling is primarily a GPU-time reducer. If you’re CPU-bound, FSR might change little or even worsen things by shifting
the workload to different passes. Use overlay metrics (GPU utilization, frame time breakdown if available).

• If GPU is pegged and frame times drop when lowering resolution → GPU-bound. FSR likely helps.
• If GPU is low utilization and frame times don’t change with resolution → CPU/IO-bound. Fix that first.

Third: verify temporal inputs (FSR 2-class)

If artifacts are temporal (ghosting, unstable detail), assume the inputs are wrong until proven otherwise.
Check motion vectors on animated objects, particles, transparencies, and camera cuts.

• Do vectors include skinned meshes?
• Are they in the correct coordinate space and scale?
• Is jitter applied consistently to color, depth, and vectors?
• Are reactive masks authored for problematic materials?

Fourth: isolate presentation issues

Frame generation and VRR can create “looks smooth but feels off” reports. Test with:
fixed refresh vs VRR, VSync on/off, frame cap on/off, and compare consistent scenarios.

Fifth: only then tune sharpness and mode defaults

Sharpness and mode selection are last-mile. Do not use them to hide broken vectors or stutter.
If you do, you’ll ship a configuration that fails on the next driver update anyway.

Three corporate mini-stories from the trenches

Mini-story 1: The incident caused by a wrong assumption

A mid-sized studio rolled out a patch enabling a temporal upscaler by default on “compatible GPUs.”
QA had validated the feature on a clean set of scenes and declared it stable. The performance numbers looked great.
The release went out on a Thursday afternoon, because of course it did.

Within hours, support tickets described “ghost trails” behind characters in rainy levels.
Players posted clips where droplets and particle splashes left smears across the screen, like the camera lens was coated in syrup.
The team assumed the upscaler’s algorithm had a bug and opened a vendor ticket, then started drafting a hotfix to disable it.

The actual cause was smaller and more humiliating: motion vectors for particle systems had been turned off months earlier as a
micro-optimization. It was fine under native resolution with standard TAA, because particles were mostly noisy and transient.
Temporal upscaling made that missing data visible by trying to reuse history where it shouldn’t.

The fix wasn’t “turn off upscaling.” It was to restore motion vectors for the particle pass and add reactive masking for
specific water materials. They also changed the rollout: default enabled only after a telemetry gate and a week of canary.

The lesson: the upscaler didn’t break the game. It revealed an assumption: “particles don’t need vectors.”
In temporal land, everything needs vectors—or you need to tell the upscaler not to trust history.

Mini-story 2: The optimization that backfired

An enterprise visualization app (think: CAD-adjacent, lots of thin lines) integrated FSR 1 as a quick performance win
on integrated GPUs. Someone had the bright idea to crank sharpening aggressively to make wireframes “pop.”
Demos looked crisp on static screenshots.

In real use, users panned and zoomed constantly. The sharpening amplified aliasing and made edges shimmer under motion.
People complained about “eye strain” and “flickering,” which is the kind of feedback you can’t argue with because it’s
literally a human nervous system bug report.

The team responded by raising the render scale, which helped quality but clawed back performance—defeating the reason FSR 1
was adopted in the first place. Worse, the new scale triggered VRAM pressure on low-end systems due to larger render targets.
Now they had shimmer and occasional stutter.

The eventual fix was boring: lower sharpening, add a thin-line anti-aliasing pass tailored to their content,
and expose a user-facing “stability vs crispness” slider with sane defaults. They also documented that FSR 1 is not a magic wand
for subpixel line art.

The lesson: sharpening is not free detail. It’s a contrast amplifier. If your content is already alias-prone,
sharpening is gasoline.

Mini-story 3: The boring but correct practice that saved the day

A large game team had a habit that looked overly process-heavy: every graphics feature had a “repro pack.”
It was a zipped set of deterministic camera paths, fixed time-of-day settings, and a script to run captures with the same
driver settings, the same frame cap, and the same shader cache state.

When they integrated a temporal upscaler (FSR 2-class), they added a few scenes specifically designed to break it:
chain-link fences, thin foliage, particles over high-contrast backgrounds, fast camera cuts, and reflective puddles.
Each scene had expected artifact thresholds and “known bad” patterns linked to common integration faults.

Months later, a driver update caused sporadic shimmering reports. The team didn’t debate opinions.
They ran the repro pack across two driver versions, found the regression was isolated to one particular post-process pass
interaction, and shipped a small mitigation while filing a clean vendor bug report with captures.

Players saw a quick patch. The engineering team avoided a panic rewrite. Management got a timeline with evidence.
And nobody had to “trust the vibes” of a single reviewer’s screenshot.

The lesson: deterministic test harnesses feel dull right up until the day they prevent a cross-team blame festival.

Common mistakes (symptoms → root cause → fix)

1) UI looks soft or smeared

Symptoms: HUD text loses crispness; minimap looks blurry; subtitles shimmer during motion.

Root cause: UI rendered into the 3D scene before upscaling, or UI treated as history-reprojectable content.

Fix: Render UI at output resolution after upscaling; if you must composite earlier, tag UI in reactive masks and avoid history reuse.

2) Ghosting behind moving characters

Symptoms: Trails behind players/NPCs, especially against high-contrast backgrounds.

Root cause: Incorrect or missing motion vectors for skinned meshes; motion vectors in wrong space; velocity clamping too aggressive.

Fix: Validate vector pass for skinned animation; ensure vectors match jittered projection; adjust reactive mask for emissive materials.

3) Shimmering foliage and thin geometry

Symptoms: Leaves sparkle; fences crawl; thin wires alias during camera movement.

Root cause: Input resolution too low for the content; excessive sharpening; unstable TAA jitter sequence; mip bias too aggressive.

Fix: Use higher FSR quality mode; reduce sharpening; review mip bias and LOD; ensure stable jitter and correct history weighting.

4) “FSR increased FPS but the game feels worse”

Symptoms: Reported FPS climbs, but mouse feels delayed or inconsistent.

Root cause: CPU-bound base frame rate; frame generation without latency controls; presentation queue buffering; mismatched VRR/VSync settings.

Fix: Measure base (non-generated) frame rate; cap appropriately; enable latency reduction if available; fix CPU bottlenecks; validate frame pacing graphs.

5) Random stutters after enabling upscaling

Symptoms: Micro-freezes every few seconds; worse on first run or after patch.

Root cause: Shader/pipeline compilation; streaming IO; VRAM overcommit; background tasks.

Fix: Warm shader caches in QA; ship pipeline caches where possible; reduce VRAM pressure via textures; profile IO; stop background overlays during test.

6) Over-sharpened “crispy” image with noisy specular highlights

Symptoms: Metallic surfaces sparkle; highlights crawl; image looks gritty.

Root cause: Sharpening amplifies temporal instability and specular aliasing; content not filtered for low internal res.

Fix: Lower sharpening; improve specular anti-aliasing (roughness adjustment, prefiltered env maps); consider higher render scale.

7) Artifacts on particles, smoke, water, and transparencies

Symptoms: Smearing smoke; water edges leave trails; particles “stick” to the screen.

Root cause: Temporal upscalers struggle with transparency that doesn’t have reliable motion/depth; missing reactive masks.

Fix: Author reactive masks for these materials; render some effects after upscaling; clamp history contribution in these regions.

8) Benchmark results don’t match player reports

Symptoms: Lab numbers say improved; players still complain about stutter.

Root cause: Benchmark path avoids streaming hotspots; caches are warm in lab; different driver settings; different refresh/VRR behavior.

Fix: Build deterministic repro scenes including streaming and traversal; track p99/p99.9 frame times; test cold-cache runs.

Checklists / step-by-step plan

Step-by-step: choosing the right FSR mode defaults

1. Set a target: 60 stable, 90 stable, 120+ competitive. Don’t pretend one default satisfies all.
2. Measure base bottleneck: GPU-bound vs CPU-bound at native and lowered res.
3. Select the mildest mode that hits target: prefer Quality/Balanced over Performance when possible.
4. Set conservative sharpening: start lower than you think; let users increase it if they enjoy pain.
5. Validate in artifact traps: foliage, fences, particles, fast pans, bright HUD over dark scenes.
6. Validate cold start behavior: first-run shader compilation and streaming.
7. Check UI composition: ensure UI is output-res and stable.
8. Document known limitations: thin lines, certain transparencies, extreme low input res.

Integration checklist: FSR 2-class temporal upscaling

• Motion vectors include: skinned meshes, rigid bodies, camera motion, and animated UV/material motion where applicable.
• Depth buffer matches the expected convention (reversed Z, range, linearization as required).
• Jitter is applied consistently across color, depth, and motion vector generation.
• Exposure is stable across frames; abrupt exposure changes reset history or reduce history weight.
• Reactive masks exist for: particles, water, transparent glass, emissive signage, animated alpha-tested foliage.
• Camera cuts and teleports trigger history reset (or equivalent logic).
• UI is rendered after upscaling (preferred) or excluded from history reuse.
• Sharpening defaults are conservative and tested under motion, not just stills.

Operations checklist: shipping without setting yourself on fire

• Canary rollout for default-on changes; track complaint rates by GPU vendor/model and driver branch.
• Regression harness with deterministic scenes; capture frame time distributions and artifact screenshots.
• Clear support script: which settings to request (mode, sharpening, frame gen, VRR, VSync).
• Driver/OS matrix for QA that reflects reality, not just your dev rigs.
• Fallback plan: allow disabling/upscaler swap without breaking saves or UI scaling.

Interesting facts & historical context

Upscaling didn’t appear out of nowhere. Here are concrete context points that explain why FSR landed the way it did:

1. FSR 1 launched in 2021, positioned as a fast spatial alternative that could be adopted broadly across GPUs.
2. FSR’s cross-vendor stance mattered: it could run on competing hardware, which lowered adoption friction for studios shipping on PC.
3. Temporal upscaling predated FSR in many engines as TAA-based reconstruction; FSR 2 formalized a high-quality, vendor-supplied path.
4. FSR 2 shifted the conversation from “sharpness tricks” to “feed me correct motion vectors,” pulling engine correctness into the spotlight.
5. Upscaling became tied to ray tracing adoption: RT costs pushed more titles toward reconstruction techniques to keep playable frame rates.
6. FSR 3 brought frame generation to AMD’s ecosystem, expanding upscaling discussions into latency and pacing rather than raw throughput.
7. Open, shader-based approaches let developers inspect and adapt integration details more easily than black-box solutions.
8. Console-to-PC expectations pushed “performance mode” thinking into PC settings menus, normalizing internal-resolution scaling.
9. Driver and compiler maturity heavily influence outcomes: two systems with “the same GPU” can produce different stutter profiles across driver branches.

FAQ

1) Is FSR “real 4K”?

No. FSR renders at a lower internal resolution and reconstructs to output resolution. The goal is “looks close enough at normal viewing distance,”
not pixel-for-pixel equivalence.

2) Why does FSR sometimes look blurry?

Usually because the input resolution is too low for the scene complexity, sharpening is low, or the game’s post-processing chain is not friendly
to reconstruction (film grain, aggressive DOF, motion blur).

3) Why does FSR sometimes look too sharp or noisy?

Over-sharpening amplifies aliasing and temporal instability. Reduce sharpening first. If specular highlights crawl, you may also need better
specular anti-aliasing in content/shaders.

4) What’s the difference between FSR 1 and FSR 2 in practice?

FSR 1 is spatial: fast and simple, fewer integration needs, weaker detail reconstruction. FSR 2 is temporal: higher potential quality,
but depends on correct motion vectors, depth, jitter, and history handling.

5) Does FSR help if I’m CPU-bound?

Not much. Lowering internal resolution reduces GPU work, but if the CPU is limiting the frame, the gains can be small.
Diagnose CPU vs GPU bound before you expect miracles.

6) Why does frame generation feel laggy sometimes?

Because generating extra displayed frames doesn’t automatically reduce input latency. If the base frame rate is low or unstable,
you can get smoother motion with similar or worse input response.

7) What’s the best default FSR mode?

For most titles: start with Quality (or Balanced at higher resolutions) and conservative sharpening. “Performance” is for when you truly need it,
and you’ve tested thin geometry and foliage carefully.

8) Why do particles and transparent effects look worse with temporal upscaling?

Transparencies don’t behave like solid geometry in motion/depth terms. Without reactive masks or special handling, the upscaler reuses history
incorrectly and you see smearing or ghosting.

9) Does enabling FSR reduce VRAM usage?

It can reduce some render target sizes, but textures, geometry buffers, and ray tracing structures often dominate VRAM.
If you’re near the VRAM limit, reduce texture settings and shadow cache sizes before expecting upscaling to fix hitching.

Conclusion: practical next steps

FSR didn’t just make upscaling popular. It made it operationally normal: a setting players expect, reviewers test,
and studios lean on to hit performance targets without gutting visuals.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that temporal reconstruction punishes sloppy engine inputs.

If you’re shipping or supporting FSR in the real world, do these next:

1. Stop using average FPS as your north star. Track p95/p99 frame times and pacing consistency.
2. Build a deterministic repro pack with scenes that intentionally stress temporal reconstruction.
3. Validate motion vectors and masks before you touch sharpness defaults.
4. Separate GPU-bound wins from CPU/IO problems. Upscaling won’t fix shader compilation or slow streaming.
5. Ship sane defaults and clear toggles. Let users opt out cleanly when their setup is the weird one.

Upscaling is now part of the baseline contract between your renderer and your players. Treat it like any other production dependency:
measure it, test it, and don’t trust it until it’s earned it.