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 [Music] 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 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 i'm 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 going to 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 5800x3d and i'm sure we'll be seeing way more 3d chip architectures in the future but that still isn't going to 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 going to 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 going to be paying you a visit all of this is to say then that in the future we're going to 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 5 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 new grounds 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 swag at ltdstore.com now sam might have 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 fidelity affects super resolution and radeon super resolution come in they're both essentially the same idea except that fsr is optimized for specific gains 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 going to have its day with it so unless you're subscribed on floatplane 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 6950xt sometimes struggles to keep frame rates high if you also want to 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 upskilling 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