Metro Exodus “FSRAA” Experiment Runs FSR 2.0 Without Upscaling with Impressive Results

AMD recently released the source code for FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 2.0, and unsurprisingly, folks aren’t just waiting around for games to officially patch in support for the temporal upscaling tech. FSR 2.0 mods have been rolled out for Cyberpunk 2077 and Dying Light 2, and it turns out the latter also easily works with a host of other games including Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Death Stranding Director’s Cut.

Well, now some modders are going beyond implementing FSR 2.0 in games, they’re also tinkering with its functionality. Redditor Muddymind decided to alter the FSR 2.0 SDK to turn off upscaling. In theory, this would turn FSR into something more akin to NVIDIA’s Deep-Learning Anti-Aliasing (DLAA). For those unfamiliar, DLAA doesn’t focus on performance by upscaling a lower-res native image, but rather, starts with a full-resolution image and focuses on producing the best quality anti-aliased result.

Well, lo and behold, our Redditor’s simple experiment worked. By forcing FSR 2.0 to render at native resolution, he essentially created “FSRAA.” MuddyMind tested this FSRAA on Metro Exodus and the results were sharper, with fewer artifacts or jaggies, than the latest version of DLSS, FSR 2.0 on Quality mode, or traditional temporal anti-aliasing. Here are several comparison images showing how “FSRAA” stacks up compared to DLSS 2.4.3, TAA, and more (image 1, image 2, image 3, image 4, image 5)

Considering these results, you have to wonder when AMD might roll out “FSRAA” officially (or whatever they would call it officially). Like DLAA, it’s audience will be somewhat niche, but it would be a nice option to have.

Again, this was achieved using the Dying Light 2 FSR 2.0 mod, which you can download here. Our Redditor simply made a change to a single line of code.

What do you think? Interested in trying out “FSRAA” for yourself? Do you think something like this will be rolled out officially?