Amd radeon image sharpening: what is this technology and what is it for?

In the field of computing and video games we always have an eternal fight to see who has the best technologies. We have seen this with the CUDA cores , the FreeSync or the mouse sensors, but there is an extra confrontation that is not so well known. Today we are going to talk about AMD Radeon Image Sharpening and its method of enhancing images.

Index of contents

AMD Radeon Image Sharpening,

Here we leave you a short promotional video (in English) that AMD itself uses to show a little the benefits of this software.

How does AMD Radeon Image Sharpening work ?

If you're a bit in the middle, it may sound like the Radeon Image Sharpening has an air similar to the Nvidia DLSS . However, they are two considerably different technologies.

Below we will talk about different aspects to consider about Radeon Image Sharpening .

Limitations

To start, we have to be very aware of the limitations of our software.

For example, this technology only supports titles based on the Vulkan, DirectX 9 and DirectX12 APIs . Apparently, this decision was made to cover most games that have not yet come out. The special case of DirectX 9 is because it was easier to adapt.

A negative point to highlight about this technology is that we can only use it in Windows 10 . Using some tricks from other Operating Systems we can trick the game, but it is not something that is natively active.

Finally, we can only use Radeon Image Sharpening if we have an AMD RX 5700 series or Polaris graphics card . Recently, this latest range of graphics has received a patch that allows you to wear this technology almost without problems.

The closest we can see to this is a small patch for ReShade that takes advantage of the part that is open source to bring it to the general public. Thanks to this, both Nvidia graphics and OpenGL , DirectX 10 and 11- based games can enjoy this technology, although for a slightly higher cost of resources.

If you want to install ReShade and try it for yourself, we recommend you visit our article about this program. The installation is simple, but a little strange, since you have to choose the executable file of the game to which you are going to install it.

To install the equivalent of Radeon Image Sharpening in ReShade you will have to add new data to the program. To do this, follow these steps:

• Download the ffx_a.h and ffx_cas.h files from the repository of this link (press the files one by one, then press "Raw" and finally Ctrl + S to save). Download wrapper shader and save it as FidelityFX_CAS.fx (the same process as above) Save the three files in the root folder of ReShade Once installed, you can adjust the sharpness to your liking. The appearance of foreign artifacts is reduced by 0.0, but the algorithm is much less aggressive. In 1.0 the change is more noticeable, but the image may be affected.

Strengths

Despite the bad start, Radeon Image Sharpening has well-defined advantages.

The first and most obvious point is that in compatible games it absorbs very few resources, so the fps remain the same.

On the other hand, its feature for rescaling images is not bad. With this, we can process a smaller and less expensive image, for example 1440p , and rescale it to 4K . Then with Image Sharpening technology we tweak it in post-processing to make it look sharper and better without sacrificing performance.

In lower level issues, it should be noted that this technology does not need to be implemented in each game individually.

As part of the Radeon Technology Pack, any company that introduces such compatibility into their game will automatically have Radeon Image Sharpening . This makes the job a lot easier, so we may see a slow rise in popularity and use of this technology.

Furthermore, this is also fairly easy to activate for users. You just have to have a not very old AMD graphics , the drivers are well updated and activate the functions in the AMD control panel. Both GPU Scaling and Radeon Image Sharpening are on the Display tab.

Source: TechSpot AMD Control Panel.

Performance and results

We do not forget. At the end of the day, being a gaming-oriented technology, the most important thing is the question of how many resources it costs us. It can look as good as it wants, but if we sacrifice 20% of the frames it's not an acceptable deal.

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However, you should not worry, since this technology hardly consumes resources.

The truth is that in the majority of tests that have been done, it achieves excellent results. They typically drop at around 0.5% and 1.4% frames per second, so the swap is pretty positive.

Regarding image rescaling, we can see a behavior similar to that of DLSS , but somewhat amplified. Depending on what resolutions and titles, we can expect an improvement of around 30%.

Source: TechSpot Metro Exodus performance with different technologies.

If you want to see comparisons between this technology and the native one, here we leave you with some screenshots from the TechSpot article:

It's hard to tell a clear difference between the three images, but still the native resolution is still higher than the simulations. However, we have to say that both AMD Radeon Image Sharpening and Nvidia DLSS do a very good job of rebuilding.

We think, perhaps, that Nvidia DLSS lags a little behind AMD's technology, but it's something the green team is working on. You recently announced that future patches would greatly improve the performance and functionality of your deployment, so we hope for great things.

Final words on these technologies

As we are moving forward today, it seems that native 4K and 8K support should wait. Therefore, rescaling and similar technologies are necessary (and the better, the better for us).

In this regard, AMD Radeon Image Sharpening seems to us a fairly successful implementation . It is an improvement almost always and hardly uses resources.

Also, if you are one of those users who are interested in the industry, the news that it is relatively easy to implement is always good. As it is a post-processing effect, it has much less obstacles when it comes to being applied.

Other cases like Ray Tracing can be more intricate because each game has a different implementation and sometimes it can even be a problem. In fact, it has recently become known that Nvidia has collaborated in the development of some games to help implement such technology.

If you have an AMD Navi or Polaris graphic, we recommend activating these features. In addition, you should also navigate the control panel a little to see if you can activate other features that interest you.

But now tell us, what do you think about the implementation of AMD Radeon Image Sharpening ? Do you think Nvidia DLSS will outperform it with future updates? Share your ideas in the comment box.

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