What this does enable, however, is an agnostic solution that can be deployed in any game - provided you're rocking one of the two rumored architectures that will support RSR (RDNA and RDNA2, in the form of AMD's RX-5000 and RX-6000 series). AMD is seemingly moving its image upscaling technique further up in the graphics pipeline, which should impact upscaling quality (as there's less information for the image upscaler to work with).
Instead, AMD seems to be targeting RSR as a game-agnostic upscaling solution that's based on FSR, but which can be enabled at the Radeon driver level for any game that supports exclusive full-screen rendering. Right off the bat, do not expect RSR to be AMD's answer to the perceived image quality advantage of NVIDIA's deep-learning-powered DLSS compared to AMD's more open (and cross-hardware compatible) FSR.
While the entire world was now focusing on Intel's own addition to the image upscaling wars with its XeSS (XE SuperSampling) tech, AMD is apparently looking to introduce a new upscaling tech as early as January 2022. The image upscaling wars keep grassing, with AMD and NVIDIA claiming as many integrations as possible for their respective FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) and DLSS (Deep-Learning Super Sampling) technologies in a bid to achieve maximum market share for their respective technologies. This uncertainty in hardware specs means that when you to go shop for an NV1, you can only expect the worst (i.e. These include the SMI SM2263XT, or Phison E13T and NAND that's either TLC or QLC. An AnandTech article from the time references how the drive, much like the A400 SATA SSD, comes in a number of controller+flash combinations. Launched in March 2021, the drive adopts a strategy by Kingston to only advertise the performance and endurance numbers that are possible with any drive hardware combination.
We did some digging, and are drawn to the origins of the NV1. This makes our review probably the first instance of an SMI+QLC combination.
This went against every other review of the NV1 we read so far, which points to a combination of a Phison E13T series controller, with either TLC or QLC NAND flash, depending on the drive capacity. After our testing, when we peeled the label for component photography, we discovered that our drive combined a Silicon Motion SM2263XT DRAM-less controller, with 96-layer QLC NAND flash by Micron Technology. Read all about it in our detailed performance review of the 1 TB variant.
Kingston NV1 is an entry-level M.2 NVMe SSD that comes at extremely tempting pricing of just $85 for the 1 TB version.