AMD’s FSR 4 upscaling is exclusive to 90-series Radeon GPUs, won’t work on other cards – Ars Technica
Like Nvidia, AMD is locking some upscaling advancements to its newest GPUs.
AMD’s new Radeon RX 90-series cards and the RDNA4 architecture make their official debut on March 5, and a new version of AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technology is coming along with them.FSR and Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) upscalers have the same goal: to take a lower-resolution image rendered by your graphics card, bump up the resolution, and fill in the gaps between the natively rendered pixels to make an image that looks close to natively rendered without making the GPU do all that rendering work. These upscalers can make errors, and they won’t always look quite as good as a native-resolution image. But they’re both nice alternatives to living with a blurry, non-native-resolution picture on an LCD or OLED display.FSR and DLSS are especially useful for older or cheaper 1080p or 1440p-capable GPUs that are connected to a 4K monitor, where you’d otherwise have to decide between a sharp 4K image and a playable frame rate; it’s also useful for hitting higher frame rates at lower resolutions, which can be handy for high-refresh-rate gaming monitors.But unlike past versions of FSR, FSR 4 is upscaling images using hardware-backed machine-learning algorithms, hardware newly added to RDNA4 and the RX 90-series graphics cards. This mirrors Nvidia’s strategy with DLSS, which has always leveraged the tensor cores found in RTX GPUs to run machine-learning models to achieve superior image quality for upscaled and AI-generated frames. If you don’t have an RDNA4 GPU, you can’t use FSR 4.Older Radeon cards (and third-party GPUs) will be limited to version 3.1 of the upscaler, which will continue to work on most modern dedicated and integrated GPUs, regardless of manufacturer.Limiting new graphical tricks to new hardware is hardly unique in the graphics business—Nvidia has gated multiple DLSS features to new GPUs, including Frame Generation for the GeForce RTX 40-series and Multi-Frame Generation for the 50-series. But it’s a first for AMD, which has typically used FSR’s open source and hardware-agnostic nature as a selling point for the technology.The good news is that adoption of FSR 4 by game developers is still a rising tide that will lift all boats. Any game that adds support for FSR 3.1 will also automatically support FSR 4 and vice versa; current FSR 3.1 games can have FSR 4 enabled in AMD’s driver even if the game doesn’t list it as an option. This may be familiar to some users of Nvidia’s DLSS, which similarly allows users to swap the DLSS .dll file that comes with your game with an updated version to take advantage of the upgrades in newer versions of the technology. Games that use FSR 3.0 or any version of FSR 1 or FSR 2 won’t support this kind of automatic upgrade.Owners of RX 90-series GPUs will be able to take advantage of the improved image quality, while owners of older GPUs or non-AMD GPUs will still be able to fall back on the inferior-but-still-generally-effective version of the technology that AMD has been developing for years now. AMD says that FSR 2.x and 3.x upscaling is officially supported on AMD cards as old as 2017’s Polaris-based Radeon RX 500-series (though older cards ought to be able to use it, too). FSR frame generation requires at least an RX 5000-series card with the first-generation RDNA architecture.Ars Technica has been separating the signal from
the noise for over 25 years. With our unique combination of
technical savvy and wide-ranging interest in the technological arts
and sciences, Ars is the trusted source in a sea of information. After
all, you don’t need to know everything, only what’s important.
