AMD FidelityFX SDK Unveiled Alongside 3 New Effects, Out in Q2

A new AMD FidelityFX SDK was announced at the Game Developers Conference 2023. The SDK is meant to be the home of all FidelityFX effects, which were previously available only as separate solutions, making it harder for game developers to implement them in their games.

At GDC 2023, Principal Member of Technical Staff Jason Lacroix hosted a dedicated talk to unveil the AMD FidelityFX SDK. During the session, he explained:

Over the last 4 years, we’ve introduced a lot of great value technology. However, it started becoming apparent that we needed a better solution going forward as we continued to grow our effects library. Our current samples had a number of problems that became more apparent as we kept adding onto it.

Inconsistencies in coding standards and styles, some of which was done in ways that were really not trivial to follow along with. We had a lot of needless boilerplate code and duplication when it came to setting up new effects. There was a general lack of stability on the backing graphics frameworks. In fact, our effects, until now, have been shipped on no less than 6 different versions of Cauldron, each of which introduced many API-breaking changes, slowing development to a pace we weren’t very happy with.

We have inconsistencies in documentation formats or very little information altogether.
Inconsistencies in feature accessors. Some of our samples had API-like accessors; however, most did not. We also had limited platform/API support. Rarely did we ship Vulkan versions at the same time as DX12 – if at all – and very few features were supported on Xbox.

Now, the SDK aims to rectify a lot of this by bringing simplicity, structure, and consistency to all of the great software you have come to expect from AMD.

The AMD FidelityFX SDK will ship in Q2 2023 via GPUOpen with native backends for both Vulkan and DirectX12, as well as a custom backend for AMD’s Cauldron.

AMD also announced three new FidelityFX effects: FidelityFX Depth of Field, FidelityFX Lens, and FidelityFX Blur, all of which are pretty self-explanatory. Additionally, Hybrid Reflections and Hybris Shadows will also be included with AMD FidelityFX SDK once it ships in Q2 2023.

The roadmap included in the slides does have some interesting extra tidbits of info. For example, version 1.0 is also expected to add a FidelityFX Shader Pre-Compiler, which should hopefully make it even easier for developers to avoid shader stuttering in their games.

In Q3, version 1.1 of the AMD FidelityFX SDK is expected to add new effects, improvements to the Cauldron backend, an Xbox-dedicated GDK backend, and support for scene interaction. Finally, version 1.2 should land in Q4 2023 with feature improvements and some new effects.

The other big GDC 2023 announcement from AMD was an updated preview of FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 3. You can learn more about that here.