AMD says 2024 will be a big year for its AI upscaling efforts

Though Nvidia has had the upper hand in the AI resolution upscaling technologies for years now, AMD may be looking to upgrade its own AI roster in the coming year. According to one of the company’s executives, AMD is now ready to lean more heavily towards AI-based technologies.

Whether big things really are on the horizon for AMD’s AI efforts remains to be seen, of course, but the CTO Mark Papermaster believes 2024 will be a “huge year” for the company in this regard. In a recent interview hosted on the No Priors podcast (via IGN) Papermaster said that AMD now has a full stack of AI-based hardware and software capabilities, which will help in “enabling [their] entire portfolio” of services.

AMD is set to focus on AI upscaling in 2024

“We have spent so many years developing our hardware and software capabilities for AI,” said Papermaster. “We’ve just completed AI enabling our entire portfolio: Cloud, edge, PCs, embedded devices, our gaming devices. We’re enabling our gaming devices to upscale using AI, and 2024 is really a huge deployment year for us.”

Notably, even though AMD does have its own competitor to Nvidia’s DLSS and Intel’s XeSS supersampling technologies, the FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), it does not leverage AI to improve its image output. Similarly, AMD has developed an alternative to Nvidia’s frame generation technology, but it too is outmatched in most cases, mainly due to its lower reliance on AI implementation.

Papermaster’s statement obvious implies that something is bound to change in how AMD handles its upscaling technology, and the upcoming RDNA 4 graphics cards may well be key in this regard. Over the past couple of generations of graphics processors, Nvidia has been far more aggressive in adopting dedicated AI hardware, such as the Tensor cores, and the presence of physical flow accelerators on its GPUs has meant Nvidia users had the upper hand when it comes to frame generation technologies.

If RDNA 4 comes out with improved hardware support for resolution upscaling and frame generation, and AMD simultaneously doubles down on AI on the software side of things, Nvidia’s lead could very well lessen, even if only slightly.