Xbox Series X/S developers now have full access to AMD’s FidelityFX tools

Developers using Xbox Series X and S development kits will now have full access to AMD’s FidelityFX toolkit.

The news was announced at Microsoft’s Game Stack Live event yesterday, and lets developers use the suite’s specific optimizations for Windows and Xbox directly from the devkit.

“This development is very exciting to all at AMD who have worked to deliver these effects into the hands of even more developers, and we will continue to strive for our highly optimized effects to be at the forefront of cross-platform game development,” an AMD statement read.

“Xbox Game Developers interested in getting started with AMD FidelityFX can do so with the latest Game Development Kit (GDK), where samples for Contrast Adaptive Sharpening, Variable Shading, and Raytraced Shadow Denoiser technologies are available.”

Contrast Adaptive Sharpening helps increase visual quality by restoring sharpness to an image that has been softened by temporal anti-aliasing to reduce ‘jaggy’ effects.

Variable Shading analyses the luminance and motion of each frame to help optimise rendering so that performance can be increased without any visible difference to the picture quality.

Raytraced Shadow Denoiser helps increase the quality of ray-tracing effects by smoothing out any noise that occurs as a result.

AMD FidelityFX is currently supported in more than 40 games, including Resident Evil Village, Far Cry 6, Dirt 5, The Medium and the PC version of Horizon Zero Dawn.

AMD has said that it will also add FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), its competitor to Nvidia‘s much-hyped DLSS upscaling technology, to the FidelityFX toolkit at some point this year for RDNA 2 Powered Gaming PCs. This has not yet been confirmed for Xbox Series X and S devkits.

DLSS is a feature exclusive to Nvidia’s RTX graphics cards and works by using AI to upscale the resolution of PC games, effectively allowing players to achieve higher graphical settings and better frame rates from their systems.