The year ends for AMD with the release of the Radeon RX 5500 XT and its annual software revamp – and this year’s Adrenalin 2020 is rather fascinating upgrade to the UI. It seeks to increase the usability, accessibility and speed of the interface, while adding some important new features. What I’m particularly interested in, however, is Radeon Boost – an AMD-developed method of scaling performance and resolution in real-time for supported games with frame-rate boosts of up to 23 per cent promised by Team Red.
AMD promises that the performance uplift comes with little loss to visual quality for most users in most cases – which would be quite a feat as the concept of a ‘free lunch’ in rendering terms is very rare indeed. So how does it work? Put simply, Boost is a very specific form of dynamic resolution scaling, but nothing really like the kind of DRS we see on many console titles. There, resolution adjusts to GPU load in favour of maintaining a target frame-rate. AMD’s driver-level version of dynamic resolution scaling scales the resolution down based upon the metric of screen movement.
In contrast to most console solutions (bar Killzone Mercenary on Vita!) Radeon Boost has no concept of your frame-rate as such and instead works on the parameter of whether your screen is in motion due to user input – if you move your mouse about, basically. The idea behind Radeon Boost is that it exploits two realities – firstly, that perception of resolution by the human eye changes in motion and that secondly, modern flat panel displays have relatively poor motion resolution, so why not reduce resolution when the display isn’t physically capable of resolving it anyway?
To take a look at Radeon Boost in action I loaded up Borderlands 3 using an RX 580 at 1440p resolution. Initially I set the resolution scaling in the control panel to 50 per cent – so at the extreme, in fast motion, native resolution will be 720p. It’s important to point out here that while 3D elements scale, static elements like the HUD do not – these remain at native resolution throughout. Having these in-game aspects scaling too would most definitely break the illusion.
The first thing I noticed was that any and every mouse movement results in dynamic resolution scaling – not just controlling a character view in gameplay. Static screens where you use the mouse to control the UI see real-time resolution reduction, which does look a little bit jarring at the default Radeon Boost settings. The other most noticeable aspect is how the DRS effect scales in accordance with the velocity of mouse movement: slower, more measured mouse movement won’t see a huge decrease in pixel-count, while ultra fast, constant mouse movement keeps the resolution down to 50 per cent for the entire time.