Xbox gets AMD FidelityFX — laying groundwork for Super Resolution

During its Game Stack Live event this week for developers, Microsoft revealed that it is incorporating AMD’s FidelityFX tools directly into the Xbox Series X/S game development kit. This enables studios to get parity between their PC and Xbox versions of a game. But this implementation of FidelityFX also serves as a foundation for Xbox games to get important next-gen visual features like AMD Super Resolution. That tech is crucial for getting acceptable performance from high-resolution visuals with ray tracing.

In a blog post, AMD said effects like denoising for ray-traced shadows are coming to Xbox with FidelityFX now. Denoising is important because ray-traced lighting can make shadows look grainy (or noisy) without this smoothing algorithm. And this may help AMD because many publishers build their games for consoles first. So if those graphical effects are on Xbox, devs may put in the effort to support AMD-exclusive features. And then that work will also pay off on PC, where the company is competing for market share with Nvidia.