AMD FSR Can Be Applied to (Almost) All Vulkan Games via Proton’s FSHack

AMD’s FSR is getting unofficial implementations in several games, mods, and hacks. After the mods that added FidelityFX Super Resolution to Grand Theft Auto V and Assetto Corsa, Georg ‘DadSchoorse’ Lehmann found a way to apply FSR to (almost) all Vulkan games under the Linux environment, as part of Proton’s fullscreen hack.

The modder himself does warn that it’s not a perfect implementation, but we reckon it’s still impressive in its own right.

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This is an implementation of AMD’s FSR https://gpuopen.com/fidelityfx-superresolution/ in fshack, which allows users to chose it instead of linear/nearest filtering for upscaling. It can be enabled using WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR=1 and a lower in game resolution than the display’s native one. WINE_FULLSCREEN_FSR_STRENGTH controls the amount of sharpening (not to be confused with amd’s quality presets, those are about the input resolution), 0 is the maximum sharpness, higher values mean less sharpening. The default is 5.

Caveats:

• Only works in vulkan games (dxvk and vkd3d-proton included).
• Some games upscale on their own, without using fshack, when you select a lower resolution in game. FSR won’t work in those.
• Obviously applying FSR to the final image is not ideal, it should be applied before the UI is drawn and before some post processing effects like film grain.
• AMD also recommends a negative LOD bias, which is not possible in a generic way without problems.
• This is only the slow fp32 version, if accepted I might follow up with the fp16 version.
• The patchset is a bit of a mess. If the huge commit is a problem I can try to split it up a bit.
• An environment variable to add custom resolution modes (e.g. 2048×1152) would be nice to more directly control the quality.

YouTuber GloriousEggroll, who primarily covers Linux-related gaming news, already posted a video showcase of this FSR hack used with Forza Horizon 4, a game that most certainly does not natively support AMD’s latest technology. According to GloriousEggroll, FSR Ultra Quality was able to squeeze another 25 frames per second when playing at 4K resolution and Ultra settings.

This also bodes extremely well for the Steam Deck, since Valve’s upcoming handheld PC uses Proton with its customized SteamOS by default. Of course, you also have the option of installing Windows on the Steam Deck if you wish.