AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution

AMD’s FSR 4 upscaling is exclusive to 90-series Radeon GPUs, won’t work on other cards

AMD, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, FidelityFX Super Resolution, fsr 4, gaming, Radeon, radeon 9070, rdna4, Tech / DJ Henderson / March 2, 2025

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.

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AMD promises big upscaling improvements and a future-proof API in FSR 3.1

AMD, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, dlss, fsr, fsr 3.1, gaming, GPU, intel, NVIDIA, Radeon, Tech / Shannon Garcia / March 21, 2024

upscale upscaling —

API should help more games get future FSR improvements without a game update.

Andrew Cunningham – Mar 21, 2024 5: 20 pm UTC

Last summer, AMD debuted the latest version of its FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technology. While version 2.x focused mostly on making lower-resolution images look better at higher resolutions, version 3.0 focused on AMD’s “Fluid Motion Frames,” which attempt to boost FPS by generating interpolated frames to insert between the ones that your GPU is actually rendering.

Today, the company is announcing FSR 3.1, which among other improvements decouples the upscaling improvements in FSR 3.x from the Fluid Motion Frames feature. FSR 3.1 will be available “later this year” in games whose developers choose to implement it.

Fluid Motion Frames and Nvidia’s equivalent DLSS Frame Generation usually work best when a game is already running at a high frame rate, and even then can be more prone to mistakes and odd visual artifacts than regular FSR or DLSS upscaling. FSR 3.0 was an all-or-nothing proposition, but version 3.1 should let you pick and choose what features you want to enable.

It also means you can use FSR 3.0 frame generation with other upscalers like DLSS, especially useful for 20- and 30-series Nvidia GeForce GPUs that support DLSS upscaling but not DLSS Frame Generation.

“When using FSR 3 Frame Generation with any upscaling quality mode OR with the new ‘Native AA’ mode, it is highly recommended to be always running at a minimum of ~60 FPS before Frame Generation is applied for an optimal high-quality gaming experience and to mitigate any latency introduced by the technology,” wrote AMD’s Alexander Blake-Davies in the post announcing FSR 3.1.

Generally, FSR’s upscaling image quality falls a little short of Nvidia’s DLSS, but FSR 2 closed that gap a bit, and FSR 3.1 goes further. AMD highlights two specific improvements: one for “temporal stability,” which will help reduce the flickering and shimmering effect that FSR sometimes introduces, and one for ghosting reduction, which will reduce unintentional blurring effects for fast-moving objects.

The biggest issue with these new FSR improvements is that they need to be implemented on a game-to-game basis. FSR 3.0 was announced in August 2023, and AMD now trumpets that there are 40 “available and upcoming” games that support the technology, of which just 19 are currently available. There are a lot of big-name AAA titles in the list, but that’s still not many compared to the sum total of all PC games or even the 183 titles that currently support FSR 2.x.

AMD wants to help solve this problem in FSR 3.1 by introducing a stable FSR API for developers, which AMD says “makes it easier for developers to debug and allows forward compatibility with updated versions of FSR.” This may eventually lead to more games getting future FSR improvements for “free,” without the developer’s effort.

AMD didn’t mention any hardware requirements for FSR 3.1, though presumably, the company will still support a reasonably wide range of recent GPUs from AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. FSR 3.0 is formally supported on Radeon RX 5000, 6000, and 7000 cards, Nvidia’s RTX 20-series and newer, and Intel Arc GPUs. It will also bring FSR 3.x features to games that use the Vulkan API, not just DirectX 12, and the Xbox Game Development Kit (GDK) so it can be used in console titles as well as PC games.

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