AMD FSR 2.1 fixes ghosting issues bringing image quality closer than ever to Nvidia DLSS

AMD has released today its latest FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) version 2.1. This is a major update as it addresses one of the biggest problems that FSR 2.0 exhibited. While the latter significantly improved image quality over FSR 1.0 as a result of incorporating temporal up-scaling over spatial up-scaling, a clear artefact in the form of ghosting was present in images that were up-scaled using FSR 2.0. Such ghosting issues have been eliminated and improvements to the overall color range has been made in FSR 2.1.

AMD details the changes that were made in FSR 2.1 and their impacts below:

Change Impact

Motion vector divergence used to diminish locked pixels

This should alleviate ghosting issues on geometry with motion vectors not matching underlying pixel colors.

Disocclusion logic is now able to detect disocclusions in areas with only small depth separation between objects.

This should alleviate ghosting issues and improve upscaling quality on some disocclusion cases.

Improved upscaled output quality by turning some half-precision computations to full precision.

This should improve overall color range and temporal stability of the upscaled image produced.

Reactive Mask updates:

Dilation now based on input colors to avoid expanding of reactiveness into non-relevant areas of the upscaled output.

The full data range [0.0, 1.0] is now used.

This should alleviate ghosting issues on transparent geometry such as particles.

Composition and Transparency Mask updates:

Dilation now based on input colors to avoid expanding of lock diminishing into non-relevant areas of the upscaled output.

This should alleviate ghosting issues on geometry with motion vectors not matching underlying pixel colors.

Change	Impact
Motion vector divergence used to diminish locked pixels	This should alleviate ghosting issues on geometry with motion vectors not matching underlying pixel colors.
Disocclusion logic is now able to detect disocclusions in areas with only small depth separation between objects.	This should alleviate ghosting issues and improve upscaling quality on some disocclusion cases.
Improved upscaled output quality by turning some half-precision computations to full precision.	This should improve overall color range and temporal stability of the upscaled image produced.
Reactive Mask updates: Dilation now based on input colors to avoid expanding of reactiveness into non-relevant areas of the upscaled output. The full data range [0.0, 1.0] is now used.	This should alleviate ghosting issues on transparent geometry such as particles.
Composition and Transparency Mask updates: Dilation now based on input colors to avoid expanding of lock diminishing into non-relevant areas of the upscaled output.	This should alleviate ghosting issues on geometry with motion vectors not matching underlying pixel colors.

AMD also adds that there are other small bug fixes in the release.

FSR 2.1 is currently available in Farming Simulator 22 which was released with the recent patch version 1.7.1.0. In the image comparison below you can see the improvement FSR 2.1 brings. The before image is upscaled using FSR 2.0 while the after image is done using FSR 2.1:

In case the above before/after image fails to load properly, here is another example with the two images side by side:

AMD FSR 20 vs FSR 21 image comparison in Farming Simulator 22

Lastly, AMD adds that the Unreal Engine (UE) plugins for FSR have also been updated so that FSR 2.1 can now be added to games using UE versions 4.26, 4.27, and UE 5. You can find more details on GPUOpen's official website here.