Radeon Boost

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Mega6

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Radeon Boost feature possible soon in December driver update.


“Boost intercepts and on the fly modifies commands sent from the game to the graphics card, optimizing performance frame by frame. When you are in action and the camera moves, Boost decreases the resolution to boost the framerate. When camera stops, it restores full resolution. This provides optimal responsiveness and smoothness for the game, even with weak graphics card.”
 
Mega6 said:
Radeon Boost feature possible soon in December driver update.


“Boost intercepts and on the fly modifies commands sent from the game to the graphics card, optimizing performance frame by frame. When you are in action and the camera moves, Boost decreases the resolution to boost the framerate. When camera stops, it restores full resolution. This provides optimal responsiveness and smoothness for the game, even with weak graphics card.”
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As always, interesting idea, but we'll see how it works before passing judgment.
 
Hmm dynamic resolution is used on consoles since the prior generation, it's a good enough solution to ensure constant performance on shooters, so I can see that for budget gaming it could be useful.

The mileage will vary if it is ever implemented.


Edit:

Consoles most likely will use checkerboard rendering for 4k 30 instead of dynamic resolution, technically you could do both, but then you would kill IQ too much.

Checkerboard rendering = let's say that you count your pixels from the top left to the bottom right and every even frame you render only the even pixels, every odd frame you render the odd pixels, your output at any moment is a "smart" composition of freshly rendered pixels and the old ones. You halve the required bandwidth / performance required this way (the added smart algorithm is still much faster than properly rendering the pixels).

Each method has its pros and cons.

Id games like Wolfenstein are example of dynamic resolution while Horizon Zero dawn is a example of checkerboard rendering. Halo MCC = dynamic resolution iirc but I think that they only scale one axis instead of both. After digging a bit it's Halo 2 Anniversary on the MCC the one with x axis only scaling, down to 13xx * 1080
 
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Employing dynamic resolution is one of the main reasons RAGE and DOOM run so well.

I think AMD would be smart to implement something like DXVK in their drivers bundle. Fuck DX and all game studios that haven't moved to Vulkan
 
Dynamic resolution is definitely a nice option to have. Though it seems like it might require game dev support.
 
I expect it to work as well as Radeon Anti-Lag and Enhanced Sync.
 
Interesting - hopefully AMD will do it in an open (source) way of doing things. It seems a bit like the VR performance holy grail of "FOViated Rendering" - that is to say, the headset (like an Index or Vive Pro with the Eye tracking upgrade) communicates where you're looking at the moment through eye tracking and anywhere else doesn't have to be as high resolution and/or rendered at all. Split second changes and corrections done well enough can be a big performance benefit ; seems the same here for conventional displays. Lets hope the reality heads up to whats on paper.
 
RanceJustice said:
Interesting - hopefully AMD will do it in an open (source) way of doing things. It seems a bit like the VR performance holy grail of "FOViated Rendering" - that is to say, the headset (like an Index or Vive Pro with the Eye tracking upgrade) communicates where you're looking at the moment through eye tracking and anywhere else doesn't have to be as high resolution and/or rendered at all. Split second changes and corrections done well enough can be a big performance benefit ; seems the same here for conventional displays. Lets hope the reality heads up to whats on paper.
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I don’t know how open-source it’s going to be since it appears to be driver suite integrated
 
Mega6 said:
I don’t know how open-source it’s going to be since it appears to be driver suite integrated
Click to expand...

Well, technically so is FreeSync and AMD has written completely ground-up open source drivers for Linux (plus a little add-on of sorts for those who wanted proprietary parts of the codebase they couldn't open. In the past, there were totally divergent proprietary ), so its at least possible in theory.
 
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RanceJustice said:
Interesting - hopefully AMD will do it in an open (source) way of doing things. It seems a bit like the VR performance holy grail of "FOViated Rendering" - that is to say, the headset (like an Index or Vive Pro with the Eye tracking upgrade) communicates where you're looking at the moment through eye tracking and anywhere else doesn't have to be as high resolution and/or rendered at all. Split second changes and corrections done well enough can be a big performance benefit ; seems the same here for conventional displays. Lets hope the reality heads up to whats on paper.
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No matter the video card the graphics driver is already "intercepting" commands sent to the card. The different part is modifying them on the fly (driver-level, per-game optimizations already do this statically). I imagine that process is not difficult, but the modification part is going to be specific to AMD hardware along with the optimizations needing to be made for specific games. So there really is no point in opening this up to anyone else. The question is will the increased latency be worth the tradeoff in performance. AMD obviously seems to think so.
 
Of course it doesn't look bad in Borderlands, but holy hell does that look bad in GTA and Tomb Raider. Those hitches in the HWUB video before the frame time drops would not be good in a twitch shooter. Maybe it was because of their setup along with recording software, but I'd be interested to hear others' experiences.

Caveats are DX11 only and only 8 games are supported at the moment.
 
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I watched the HWUB video. Meh.

It keys entirely off your mouse movement, which means if you are running straight through a busy area, and getting slow downs, it will do nothing.
 
Just installed, didn't DDU beforehand. Hopefully everythings ok

The UI reminds me of that Raptr deal they had going a couple years back. However the controls and fonts are a bit too BIG for my liking, the whole UI screams LOUD

I like the performance tab though. Never was a fan of Wattman graphs where you only had peak and avg values plotted.

Gonna give Boost a try with BFV. Hopefully I can hit 4K 60 on high settings
 
Mega6 said:
I don’t know how open-source it’s going to be since it appears to be driver suite integrated
Click to expand...

yeah i just don't see an easy way for them to open source this either since it's going to be pretty specific to their hardware but if the idea works maybe we start seeing it being implemented at a game level so that it works for everyone or maybe there's plans for this to be used on next gen consoles to make 4k60 easier to implement without the horrendous need of upscaling 960p to 4k that exists in some games on current gen consoles.
 
Or you can just play games set to your hardware specifications? God forbid you have to use medium or low settings, or buy a 1920x1080 monitor instead of a 4K one. The past few years have all been about improving motion clarity and now we're introducing a performance technique that tosses that progress out the window? Not a fan.
 
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