 You want a faster GPU, how do you get one? Well, instead of turning your air conditioning into a chiller, AMD wants you to fiddle with the settings? Uh, yeah. According to them, you can get 40% more performance out of your existing hardware without spending a dime. And AMD sponsored this video so that we could go through their numbers and explain to you how to do it. All right, let's imagine you're AMD, and you're trying to make the next fastest GPU in the world. What do you do? Well, in the past, you leaned on two things to increase your performance. More transistors, and if that didn't work, more power. The problem is, adding more transistors and power will be impossible unless you want to enter big dumb territory at this point. Right now, high-end GPUs draw close to 500 watts. You know what also draws 500 watts? This 500 watt space heater. Unlike Linus, my computer room isn't very big, so in the summer, I have to seriously undervolt my system to avoid poaching in my own sweat. Until I move, there's just no way that I'm buying a card with an over 350 watt TDP, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Even if the raw heat output isn't a problem, people in the office have actually heated their homes by mining in the winter, so I guess it's a feature, not a bug. In North America, we've got garbage 120 volt power out of most of our outlets, meaning that from a single circuit, you can get 1800 watts max. We're actually getting close to the point where desktops will need a dedicated circuit, like forget plugging in a blender or a vacuum on the same circuit as your PC. Now in Europe, they use 240 volt power, so overloading a circuit is less of a problem for them. However, European wars have been pretty bad for energy prices lately, and they've gone from high to absolutely insane. If GPUs get any more power hungry, it could get to the point where around a freaking war zone is gonna noticeably affect your power bill. All right, so if we can't feasibly add more power, then we're gonna need more transistors, and this is typically accomplished by physically shrinking the transistors. Sure, you're familiar by now with terms like 12 nanometer, seven nanometer, five nanometer, and so on and so forth. The problem is that the cost of developing new process nodes has gone from very expensive to, oh my God, that's a lot of money. Now to be clear, chip makers are willing to make those investments, but the process nodes are gonna start sticking around for longer to ensure that they get a return. AMD was able to get around this a bit by switching to 3D chip stacking in the 5800X 3D, and I'm sure we'll be seeing way more 3D chip architectures in the future, but that still isn't gonna help us completely break the laws of physics. We are getting scary close to the point where if you make transistors smaller, quantum tunneling becomes a big problem. Now, I'm not gonna pretend to fully understand quantum tunneling, but basically, if the transistors are too small, the electrons will sometimes just pass straight through. Have that happen a couple of times, and Mr. Blue Screen is gonna be paying you a visit. All of this is to say then that in the future, we're gonna have to make games run faster by working smarter rather than harder. And the first way that AMD is doing this is with smart access memory or SAM. The TL didn't watch about SAM, is that if you have an AMD CPU and a GPU, go enable it right now, and you could get a five to 10% performance improvement in many games. How did AMD do this? Well, in the past, a CPU could only access 256 megabytes of the GPU's VRAM at a time, which was fine back when you were sneakily watching Newgrounds on the school computers. But in 2022, your CPU should be able to access gigabytes of VRAM at a time. And with smart access memory, you can do just that. To enable smart access memory, simply hop into the BIOS, make a detour to make sure that DOCP is enabled, by the way. That's a tech tip. And then click this button right up here that says resize bar. I don't know how common this button is, so you might have to head over to advanced mode, go to advanced PCI subsystem settings and enable above 4G decoding, then set resize bar support to auto, and boom, now your games run faster and you didn't have to spend any money. You can celebrate by picking up a Swack It at lttstore.com. Now, SAM might've been able to get Frodo to Mount Doom. Nice joke, love it by the way. But it might not be enough to get you the frame rates that you're looking for. That's where FidelityFX super resolution and Radeon super resolution come in. They're both essentially the same idea, except that FSR is optimized for specific games and leaves HUD elements at native resolution, while RSR is implemented in the drivers and can be used on any game. We'll be using FSR for the rest of the video unless I'm specifically talking about RSR. Basically what FSR does is render the game at a lower resolution, then use a combination of AI and sharpening to fill back in the lost pixels. This can give you a massive increase in performance, like 10 to 50% depending on your settings. But it does come with the caveat that you're going to be decreasing image quality. The question is by how much? And this is where I'd like to shout out AMD for a second. Typically for this kind of testing, I would just set up a single computer and only test on that. But AMD actually sent us over three systems to target three different popular gaming resolutions and the results between the different resolutions tell a really interesting story. First of all, at 1080p, you should only use FSR or RSR if you absolutely have to. Even slight downgrades in resolution can lead to an image that's softer than 10 ply toilet paper. So if you need that extra 20% of performance, you should try and get it by dropping the in-game settings rather than enabling FSR. I'll put some examples on the screen, but realistically YouTube compression is gonna have its day with it. So unless you're subscribed on Flowplane, this might not be that meaningful to you. At 1440p however, it's more of a mixed bag depending on the game. Assassin's Creed Valhalla for example, looks great with RSR enabled with a nearly imperceptible loss in image quality during the majority of your gameplay. Tiny Tina's Wonderland and Horizon Zero Dawn are less favorable due to how FSR works however. Tiny Tina's Wonderland, a Borderlands offshoot, has hard black lines around basically everything which can become a nightmare for aliasing and in a lot of situations can end up looking worse than if you didn't enable it at all. Horizon Zero Dawn on the other hand, has everything close to the player looking great, but the benchmark has a lot of stone textures that can start looking a little strange in the distance. FSR can have some trouble deciding what to do with a line about a pixel thick when it's upscaling. And this is especially true if it's on a moving object and this is especially true at lower quality settings. Should that pixel be light? Should it be dark? It's hard to say given the amount of information that it has to go off of. This is compounded by the fact that FSR 1.0 has no temporal component. It just sees the frame as it is with no knowledge of what came before or what is expected to come after which can lead to shimmering like I mentioned before where a pixel with a fine black line can actually change from light to dark frame by frame. AMD knows however, that the lack of temporal information is a problem with FSR 1.0 compared to its competitors. And they've actually included temporal information in the recently released FSR 2.0. That tech looks really promising based on the small amount of testing that I've seen, but currently it's not supported in many games, unlike RSR that can be enabled for any title through Radeon software. Back to testing, 4K is where FSR 1.0 really seems to come into its own. Here we've got enough pixels that even a 6950 XT sometimes struggles to keep frame rates high if you also wanna turn up your details. And FSR is getting enough pixels in to spit a good image out. My complaints in Tiny Tina's Wonderland and Horizon Zero Dawn are basically gone with the small lines and textures getting rendered with almost zero weirdness. And while if you're really looking for it, you might be able to find some shimmering in the distance, you'd have to be playing one hell of an unimmersive game for you to be distracted enough by it to notice anything going wrong. My main takeaways though, are that you should absolutely enable smart access memory. And if you're gaming at 1440p or 4K, at least give FSR a try. It works on AMD and Nvidia GPUs. I mean, heck, even Intel integrated ones. So if your poor older GPU is struggling, this could be a way to claw back some frames. It's probably a lot better than letting your monitor do the upscaling, that's for sure. So huge thanks to AMD for sponsoring this video. If you guys enjoyed it, maybe go check out our Play Button PC. Really, that's an odd one to throw too. It's a good video. Go check it out.