At last night's Microsoft Game Stack Live developer event, AMD made an announcement that promises to improve the graphics quality and performance of many future Xbox Series X and S titles: availability for FidelityFXtool developers, designed to take full advantage of and optimize the console's RDNA 2 GPU.

But what is it? Already used by PC developers on over 40 games so far, FidelityFX tools allow you to improve many aspects of game graphics while keeping the consumption of GPUs and resources low, resulting in games that manage to "squeeze" the available hardware much better. Among the various features available, the most important is certainly fidelityFX Super Resolution,AMD's response to Nvidia's DLSS that allows developers to render titles at lower resolutions (thus allowing themselves to "push" more on graphics) then using an "intelligent" upscaling that does not make any loss of resolution perceived. This feature will be released by AMD later this year.

The other features already in the toolset are:

• FidelityFX Contrast Adaptive Sharpening - Brings out the details - Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS) helps increase visual quality by allowing extraordinary visual clarity with optional upscaling to restore lost details after the application of Temporal Anti-Aliasing (TAA).
• FidelityFX Ambient Occlusion - More realistic geometry shading - The Combined Adaptive Compute Ambient Occlusion (CACAO) optimized by the AMD RDNA architecture helps to dynamically and efficiently improve the appearance of objects based on their exposure to ambient light.
• FidelityFX Variable Shading - Get Quality Performance - Use AMD RDNA 2 Architecture Support for Variable Rate Shading (VRS) to analyze frame luminance and motion and help optimize rendering for optimal performance without lowering image quality.
• FidelityFX Screen Space Reflections - High-quality realistic reflections - The AMD implementation of Stochastic Screen Space Reflections (SSSR) delivers high-quality reflections with minimal overhead via optimized computational shader and denoising optimized for AMD RDNA architecture.
• FidelityFX Denoiser - High Quality Raytracing and Effects - Denoising optimized for AMD RDNA architecture to help improve the visual quality of real-time raytracing and other gaming effects.
• FidelityFX HDR Mapper - High Quality HDR Game - Optimized for use with AMD FreeSync Premium Pro1 displays, AMD's Luminance Preserving Mapper (LPM) delivers superb HDR content and a wide range of colors.
• FidelityFX Downsampler - ACCELERATED MIP layer generation - Optimized for AMD's RDNA architecture, amd shader-based Single Pass Downsampler (SPD) generates texture MIP layers using asynchronous computation for optimal performance.
• FidelityFX Parallel Sort - Highly optimized Radix sorting - Integrates into games a highly optimized, computational-based and optimized version for the AMD RDNA architecture of the radix sort algorithm.

All this will seem like a foreign language for most of you, unless you have specific interests in graphic rendering and game development: what we need to know, however, as xbox series X and S owners, is that the titles for our consoles will be able to draw even more on the power of the hardware in the future, creating even more realistic and performing graphics. We look forward to discovering the fruits of all this!