I haven't really been paying much attention to the latest GPU news, but can AMD cards do ray tracing and dlss and all that jazz that comes with RTX cards?

[–] natebluehooves@pawb.social 6 points 3 months ago (2 children)

DLSS is off the table, but you CAN raytrace. That being said I do not see the value of RT myself. It has the greatest performance impact of any graphical setting and often looks only marginally better than baked in lighting.

[–] cyborganism@lemmy.ca 4 points 3 months ago

It depends greatly on the game. I've seen a huge difference in games like Control where the game itself was used to feature that... Well... Feature! You can see it in the quality of the lighting and the reflections. You also get better illumination on darker areas thanks to radiated lighting. It's much more natural looking.

[–] linkhidalgogato@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 months ago

dlss is a brand name both amd and intel have their own version of the same thing, and they are only a little worse if at all.

[–] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 4 points 3 months ago

Yes, but by different names. They use FSR that's basically the same thing, I haven't noticed a difference in quality. Ray tracing too, just not branded as RTX

[–] vithigar@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

There is analogous functionality for most of it, though it's generally not quite as good across the board.

FSR is AMD's answer to DLSS, but the quality isn't quite as good. However the implementation is hardware agnostic so everyone can use it, which is pretty nice. Even Nvidia's users with older GPUs like a 1080 who are locked out of using DLSS can still use FSR in supported games. If you have an AMD card then you also get the option in the driver settings of enabling it globally for every game, whether it has support built in or not.

Ray tracing is present and works just fine, though their performance is about a generation behind. It's perfectly usable if you keep your expectations in line with that though. Especially in well optimized games like DOOM Eternal or light ray tracing like in Guardians of the Galaxy. Fully path traced lighting like in Cyberpunk 2077 is completely off the table though.

Obviously AMD has hardware video encoders. People like to point out that the visual quality of then is lower than Nvidia's but I always found them perfectly serviceable. AMD's background recording stuff is also built directly into their driver suite, no need to install anything extra.

While they do have their own GPU-powered microphone noise removal, a la RTX Voice, AMD does lack the full set of tools found in Nvidia Broadcast, e.g. video background removal and whatnot. There is also no equivalent to RTX HDR.

Finally, if you've an interest in locally running any LLM or diffusion models they're more of a pain to get working well on AMD as the majority of implementations are CUDA based.