So, what is Radeon Image Sharpening?
But as we observed withGeForce’s DLSS, manufacturer’s claims do not always reflect reality.
The second use case is for resolution downsampling.
This will inevitably make the image softer as it’s not being rendered at the native resolution.
It’s a simple switch in Radeon parameters.
They go on to say this prevents a number of artifacts you get with traditional sharpening.
There is a pretty big catch, though.
Crucially, this means DirectX 11 titles are not supported.
Enabling Radeon Image Sharpening is straightforward.
We should also mention RIS is being treated as a global setting right now.
Just something to keep in mind.
Starting by comparing the difference between RIS on and off at native 4K.
The sharpened image is indeed noticeably sharper and cleans up that little bit of softness in the original image.
On close textures it has a minor effect and slightly improves what is already a crisp texture.
With that said, there are some flaws that shouldn’t be ignored.
Same goes for the train tracks and some other areas.
For example when near the water here, Metro Exodus does have some screen space reflection artifacts.
They are more noticeable with RIS enabled, as the artifacts are getting sharpened to be more visible.
A minor issue, but something we spotted.
Time to look at some results when downsampling.
Not an ideal way to play on a high-resolution display.
However we see different results when downsampling in the 1800p range.
In Metro Exodus we set a 0.7x shader scale which is roughly equivalent to 1800p.
Without sharpening the 1800p image is obviously softer than native 4K.
We turned on sharpening for the 1800p image and… wow.
We were seriously impressed with the results here.
In the best cases, DLSS is as good as sharpened 1800p for large elements and close textures.
Overall, sharpened 1800p gets a lot closer to native 4K than DLSS, at least in Metro.
We also checked out Battlefield V and the observations are about the same on this game.
Throw DLSS into the mix and it looks significantly worse than the sharpened 1700p image.
Battlefield V still has a weak DLSS implementation and can’t hold up to the basic sharpening filter.
Of course, that small visual quality loss comes with upwards of 30 percent performance uplift.
This game is a good candidate for Radeon Image Sharpening.
This is another great, low cost use case for RIS that is worth considering.
Bottom Line
Radeon Image Sharpening is genuinely impressive.
Radeon Image Sharpening isn’t perfect though.
It also doesn’t get everything right and in some edge cases can sharpen things it shouldn’t.
