AMD's FSR4 to be AI-based, designed for handhelds first.

[ToTTenTranz]

AMD plans for FSR4 to be fully AI-based — designed to improve quality and maximize power efficiency

The team in charge has already been working on this for 9–12 months.

www.tomshardware.com

What's particularly interesting is that FSR4 will move to being fully AI-based, and it has already been in development for nearly a year.

Jack Huynh: On the handheld side, my number one priority is battery life. If you look at the ASUS ROG Ally or the Lenovo Legion Go, it’s just that the battery life is not there. I need multiple hours. I need to play a Wukong for three hours, not 60 minutes. This is where frame generation and interpolation [come in], so this is the FSR4 that we're adding.

Because FSR2 and FSR3 were analytical based generation. It was filter based. Now, we did that because we wanted something with a very fast time to market. What I told the team was, "Guys, that's not where the future is going." So we completely pivoted the team about 9-12 months ago to go AI based.

So now we're going AI-based frame generation, frame interpolation, and the idea is increased efficiency to maximize battery life. And then we could lock the frames per second, maybe it's 30 frames per second, or 35. My number one goal right now is to maximize battery life. I think that's the biggest complaint. I read the returns too from the retailer, where people want to be able to play these games.

I'm not sure what they mean with "fully AI based". Even DLSS uses motion vectors to produce the final image. AMD saying they want devices like the ROG Ally and Legion Go to have more battery life sounds a little bit like they would be making use of an embedded NPU.. but both those devices use a Z1E whose access to its NPU is blocked. And the newly announced Z2E is also not getting access to its NPU either.


It could be that FSR4 isn't coming for another year or year and half, and that would mean it's only coming for RDNA5 APUs and GPU.

 

[J_Paganel]

The new FSR will be in SteamDeck2, and when it launches, all Sony games will participate in its promotion.

 

[ToTTenTranz]

The new FSR will be in SteamDeck2, and when it launches, all Sony games will participate in its promotion.

I'm actually very curious to see what the "custom hardware for AI" really means in the PS5 Pro's chip.

A quick glance at the leaked throughput numbers would imply some change at the RDNA3's WMMA to allow for higher throughput on the shader processors, and not a dedicated block.
Later on, we saw access media like Digital Foundry claiming it's a custom dedicated block, like the XDNA NPUs we're seeing in AMD's SoCs but with the GPU being able to access it directly (unlike what we're seeing in Phoenix or Strix Point).

 

[Killer_Sakoman]

I'm actually very curious to see what the "custom hardware for AI" really means in the PS5 Pro's chip.

A quick glance at the leaked throughput numbers would imply some change at the RDNA3's WMMA to allow for higher throughput on the shader processors, and not a dedicated block.
Later on, we saw access media like Digital Foundry claiming it's a custom dedicated block, like the XDNA NPUs we're seeing in AMD's SoCs but with the GPU being able to access it directly (unlike what we're seeing in Phoenix or Strix Point).

Is this AI a Sony property or is made AMD?

 

[J_Paganel]

I'm actually very curious to see what the "custom hardware for AI" really means in the PS5 Pro's chip.

A quick glance at the leaked throughput numbers would imply some change at the RDNA3's WMMA to allow for higher throughput on the shader processors, and not a dedicated block.
Later on, we saw access media like Digital Foundry claiming it's a custom dedicated block, like the XDNA NPUs we're seeing in AMD's SoCs but with the GPU being able to access it directly (unlike what we're seeing in Phoenix or Strix Point).

The AI sticker is now being put on almost everything that existed years before the AI boom.

As I understand it, this is a separate module in the APU that makes upscale images according to a software algorithm that is hidden under the concept of AI.

It's like the SSD Kraken, which compresses/decompresses data without using the CPU.

 

[J_Paganel]

Is this AI a Sony property or is made AMD?

If AMD presents this as part of its own RDNA and FSR technologies, then AMD probably owns the intellectual property.

 

[ToTTenTranz]

Is this AI a Sony property or is made AMD?

FSR4 is AMD.

The question was whether the PS5 Pro can make use of it or not, assuming its AI acceleration hardware is flexible enough.

For example, the PS4 Pro brought hardware accelerated checkerboard rendering, but later down the line we saw titles using temporal injection instead (akin to FSR2) through compute shaders.

As I understand it, this is a separate module in the APU that makes upscale images according to a software algorithm that is hidden under the concept of AI.

It's like the SSD Kraken, which compresses/decompresses data without using the CPU.

That would mean it's probably a very small block, but not flexible enough to adapt to other methods.

I thought it was strange that Cerny didn't say the AI hardware could be used for stuff other than upscaling, and that would indeed mean its use is very narrow.

 

[Killer_Sakoman]

FSR4 is AMD.

The question was whether the PS5 Pro can make use of it or not, assuming its AI acceleration hardware is flexible enough.

For example, the PS4 Pro brought hardware accelerated checkerboard rendering, but later down the line we saw titles using temporal injection instead (akin to FSR2) through compute shaders.



That would mean it's probably a very small block, but not flexible enough to adapt to other methods.

I thought it was strange that Cerny didn't say the AI hardware could be used for stuff other than upscaling, and that would indeed mean its use is very narrow.

But is the hardware in the PS5 pro a sony hadware or backported AMD hardware from RDNA4?

 

[ToTTenTranz]

But is the hardware in the PS5 pro a sony hadware or backported AMD hardware from RDNA4?

I don't think there's anything that could be named "Sony hardware" solely developed by Sony engineers in Playstation SoCs anymore.

Sony might hire low-level block designers like Synopsys for some things (just like AMD does themselves for stuff like VRAM PHYs), but my guess is most of what goes in there is designed by AMD engineers.

What the Playstation SoCs do have is hardware blocks that AMD develops for/with Sony but then chooses not to implement in their own GPUs. Like the checkerboard engine from the PS4 Pro or the cache scrubbers from the PS5, probably because they don't exist as a standard function of a major PC API (DirectX or Vulkan) so adoption would be non-existent.


If there's a separate NPU in there, it's probably a XDNA block adapted by the same former Xilinx teams that are developing the AI blocks for Copilot in AMD SoCs for mobile.