Unsurprisingly, this was started by the very same Alexander Battaglia from DigitalFoundry, who’s been nothing but wrong about FSR since it was announced (it’s spatial so it has to be terrible, right?) Got called out on it, then doubled down on what they were wrong about in the first place. And seemingly whenever there’s news about FSR they’ll have to tell everyone how DLSS is better… Ah well, it’s one way to get a review out before any other reviewer is allowed to, always follow the money.
Anyway, I’ve had some time to tinker around with FSR and the sim again, did some mix-and-matching with settings. So far I’ve found the best settings for overall image quality for higher resolutions, while maintaining reasonable performance. Glass cockpits still don’t play nice with the render scaling, I’d call it pretty unusable if applied to 1080p, but you can still get nice results with the analog planes. Just make sure the resolution doesn’t become too low.
Because Magpie doesn’t really care about the window size or resolution you have running, you can emulate something comparable to Unreal’s Temporal Super Resolution (TSR).
When running the sim in a full screen window (2160p) you can apply FSR on top, with the render scale ranging from 50 to 60% (1080p to 1228p). The TAAU does the upscaling to the full resolution and FSR is applied as an edge-enhancing and sharpening ‘cleanup’ pass. Any TAA artifacting is, of course, amplified. It still combines the best of both worlds, but at the same time amplifies the downsides of both.
Left is 4k @ 60% Scale (TAAU), right is 4k @ 60% Scale (TAAU) + FSR. You can see how FSR tries to find edges in the clouds and goes a bit haywire. Just one of the side effects I suppose.
I have sharpening disabled in the sim’s UserCfg.opt to prevent oversharpening when using FSR. If you regularly use Magpie with MSFS I recommend doing the same. Some more cropped images below;
Images here
60% Scale + TAA
60% Scale + TAA + FSR
60% scale + TAA
60% scale + TAA + FSR
60% scale + TAA
60% scale + TAA + FSR
You can even push it to 40% scale; but it does lose more detail and artifacting becomes more obvious;
40% scale + TAA
40% scale + TAA + FSR
100% scale + TAA thrown in for comparison
100% scale + TAA + FSR, heading into oversharpened territory. No point in running this, really, but looks super crisp
I really don’t see the point of NOT having FSR anymore, honestly, comparing TAAU vs FSR, the latter comes out on top for overall ‘native looking’ image. Adding TAAU and FSR together, well, see images above… I guess people aren’t GPU limited often enough for Asobo to bother? I know Sebastian from the dev team runs 40% scaling at 4k (see images above for comparisons) with a 2060 Super, and FSR cleans the image up very nicely even when it’s a third party solution running on top of everything.