After many rumors, hijinks and denials, this time it’s official. AMD has just announced that it will be bringing its FSR 4.1 upscaling technology to RDNA 3 GPUs (RX 7000) in July. Better still, the reds will do the same for RDNA 2 GPUs (RX 6000), although the latter will have to wait until 2027.
FSR 4.1 on RX 7000, 6000…and even Steam Deck
From July onwards, RDNA 3 GPUs, notably Radeon RX 7000 graphics cards but also (especially?) integrated graphics chips in mobile products such as the MSI Claw A8, will be able to benefit from FSR 4.1 scaling. Is this a way of staying ahead of Intel, which will no doubt be unveiling new chips for portable consoles in the next few days? In any case, when full FSR 4.1 support is deployed, it will benefit RX 9000, 7000 and 6000 boards, as well as the first mobile consoles, such as the Steam Deck. At present, the latter can only rely on FSR 3.1.
Until now, AMD’s main argument to justify exclusive FSR4 support on RX 9000s was the use of FP8 instruction sets, which only had hardware acceleration on RDNA4 GPUs. Needless to say, AMD hasn’t found a miracle solution for implementing this hardware acceleration on its older generations. FSR4 support will therefore be resource-hungry on RDNA2 and RDNA3 cards. For the moment, however, AMD is providing no details on this point, merely mentioning significant improvements in image quality in the announcement video.
Now, we’ll have to wait until early summer to get an idea of this real contribution. The other topic concerns the post-FSR 4.1 era. Will AMD stop there, or follow the same logic regarding the evolution of its technology and its compatibility over time with previous generations?