AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution comes to SteamVR via mod

A useful mod arrives for VR enthusiasts.

What you need to know

• AMD released FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) to help games perform better while also looking their best.
• An intrepid modder has brought FSR to SteamVR.
• FRS can now be used in games such as Skyrim VR and Fallout 4 VR.

Many gamers have enjoyed the boost to performance AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution has provided to the games it's implemented in, such as Square Enix's Avengers. Frame rates go up, PC performance improves, and the game's actual visuals and resolution remain sleek and shiny. That's the promise of FSR, and it's now being brought to SteamVR experiences to help them along.

VR games can often be demanding experiences that struggle to look quite as good as their flatscreen counterparts while also using up the same, or far more, hardware resources. Therefore, bringing FSR to them would help machines run VR experiences more efficiently while also helping keep them looking as good as is possible.

GitHub user fholger has done just that, bringing FSR to SteamVR and, by extension, a multitude of VR games (via Tom's Hardware). They'll need to be using D3D11 to have a shot at enjoying the FSR upscaling perks. And remember, because of how AMD has made FSR, it'll work on NVIDIA cards as well, so no one with the best graphics cards is excluded from trying to enhance their VR experience via fholger's mod (RTX 3060 Ti owners, rejoice!).

As an experimental mod, perfection is not guaranteed. The "Readme" area of fholger's GitHub mod posting contains the following message: "This is a best-effort experiment and hack to bring this upscaling technique to VR games which do not support it natively. Please understand that the approach taken here cannot guarantee the optimal quality that FSR might, in theory, be capable of."

There are other important disclaimers in the Readme section, so be sure to do your homework before crowbarring FSR into your SteamVR games.