AMD Big Navi graphics cards are almost here but it looks like we’ll have to wait a little while longer for AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s DLSS technology as it won’t be available until after the Radeon RX 6800XT launch.
As it stands, leaked performance benchmarks put Big Navi‘s ray tracing capabilities ahead of Nvidia’s Turing-based cards, but somewhat behind Nvidia’s Ampere architecture, according to PCGamer.
A key element that still remains to be introduced is what AMD is calling “Super Resolution,” which is AMD’s super sampling technology.
The fact that AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 series cards – without super-sampling tech – outperform Nvidia’s Turing-cards, which use super sampling technology, gives a glimpse of the potential for AMD’s Big Navi cards.
What is super sampling and why does it matter?
A key element of Nvidia’s performance advantage comes from DLSS, or Deep Learning Super Sampling.
This feature uses AI to up-sample lower-resolution visuals to higher-resolutions in real time.
This greatly speeds up graphics rendering, since scenes can be rendered at a lower resolution and then upscaled to your native resolution. This helps weather some of the performance overhead from technologies like ray tracing, which are extremely heavy, especially at high resolutions.
AMD teased their super sampling tech at their announcement event as part of the software element of its ray-tracing technology and teased further details to The Verge .
The technology will be open-source and cross-platform, which should help speed its development, and it should eventually push the technology out to the PS5 and Xbox Series X as well, so broad industry support is expected.
What we don’t know yet is an actual release date for AMD’s “Super Resolution” tech, but when it does come, we’ll have to see how well it stacks up against Nvidia’s DLSS.
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