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The dust has begun to settle on AMD’s RX 9000-series announcement, and I’ve finally had the chance to sit back and look over some of the footage in more detail, rather than scrambling to write about the impressive pricing of the new cards.
And while I’m definitely jubilant about the idea of serious competition in the mid-range GPU market, I can’t help but notice that AMD’s Toyshop tech demo showed some artifacting that makes me more than a little concerned about some of AMD’s image quality-enhancing tech.
AMD says Toyshop is stuffed with cutting-edge graphics tech, including path tracing, neural super sampling denoising, and ReStir lighting computation techniques. It follows a little robot in its journey around, what else, a toy shop, before it makes its way out into a futuristic street filled with fast-moving flying cars. It should be an impressive tech demo of just how far AMD has come with graphics technology in order to compete with Nvidia’s offerings—but in parts, I have to admit it made me wince.
For a start, there’s a lot of ghosting. In the fast moving car section, it’s tempting to write off some visible artifacts as egregious use of motion blur, but zooming in on screenshots from the footage reveals some serious visual errors.
In the shot below, take a close look at the red building in the background. There’s a lot of blurry pixel smearing on an object that is otherwise supposed to be static. Then allow your eyes to move towards the green car in the foreground, with speckled, noisy artifacts on the interior and indistinct, edge-smeared headlights, before finally coming to rest on the green car in the top right quarter of the shot—which appears to be, err, glitching through time.
I would assume that FSR 4 was involved in the running of this particular demonstration, given that all the visual doohickeys have been turned up to 11. Seeing all the artifacting introduced here I can only hope that it was perhaps running in some sort of Performance mode as a potential explanation for some of the issues, although that’s pure guesswork on my part.
Nevertheless, I happened to be glancing at the YouTube chat window when this demo was unveiled, and it was full of people noticing the very same things I did—it’s simply full of visual errors, and even streaming compression can’t hide them.
The scene with the robot staring (briefly) into the mirror at around 0:34 reveals some shimmering in the reflection as it turns and flies towards the camera, making me wonder if it was deliberately scripted to block the shot to prevent more ray tracing nasties from making an appearance. And, at the end of the video, there’s a very, very brief shot of some foliage surrounding a gate. Apologies all, but I’m very quick with the screenshot capture button:
Eeesh. Ignore the ticker-tape like effect and the black elements on the right hand side of the screenshot, as that’s a transition towards the AMD logo at the end. Look to the left, and you get a clear idea why AMD might want to quickly move on.
All in all, for something that was supposed to be a triumphant demonstration of AMD’s prowess with graphical rendering, it really didn’t impress me in the way I might have hoped. You don’t need me to analyse it frame by frame to know that there are artifacts here that don’t bode well for image quality with the new cards.
And that makes me wonder. While price to performance ratios are very important in deciding which graphics card to go for in a new generation, Nvidia has traditionally been able to beat AMD over the head with its superior image quality, especially thanks to DLSS.
And now DLSS 4 is here, with impressive visuals, relatively minimal artifacting and Multi Frame Generation, I wonder how many people will favour Nvidia once more if AMD loses out when it comes to image quality. Especially now they can potentially quadruple their frame rate with minimal quality loss if they pick an RTX 50-series card.
Still, this is merely a short demo. I’ll be testing out DLSS 4 versus FSR 4 (and all the new AMD image quality upgrades) myself at the earliest opportunity to perform a more in-depth analysis, and I’m very intrigued to see what AMD has been cooking. By the looks of this demo, however, my expectations in general have been tempered—and that might be cause for concern for potential buyers of the otherwise-impressive looking RX 9070-series cards.
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Kurt Indovina
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