While official support for FSR 4 remains exclusive to RDNA 4 GPUs, modders remains hard at work bringing the upscaler to other architectures. One of the latest beneficiaries of this community-driven effort is Steam Deck, running its RDNA 2 APU.
YouTuber Deck Wizard shared their experience of FSR 4 on Steam Deck, providing video footage of the upscaler running in Cyberpunk 2077, Marvel’s Spider-Man 2, and Stellar Blade. The games look notably better using the AI upscaler relative to FSR 3.1, with more visible image detail and far fewer visual artifacts.
This boost to image quality unfortunately comes with a price, namely performance, owing to a lack of hardware support for FP8 operations. In terms of frame rates, every game Deck Wizard trialled FSR 4 with ran about 10fps worse, translating to an enormous ~25% reduction. In all instances, capping the frame rate to 30fps seems to be the best move to maintain a stable experience.
Deck Wizard provides an easy-to-follow tutorial for getting FSR 4 running on your own Steam Deck. It’s unclear how each game will take to the new DLL files, but I’d suggest sticking with titles that already have FSR 3.1 baked in for the best results.
It’s clear that those without a Radeon RX 9070 XT or other RDNA 4 GPUs are hungry for FSR 4, performance reductions or not. Support for the feature on Radeon RX 7000 Series cards continues to grow as modders continue to tinker, leaving everyone asking why AMD doesn’t just come out with an official support program.
Perhaps FSR Redstone will see AMD finally bring FSR 4 to architectures outside of RDNA 4. We should find out later this year, when the company deploys the “next chapter” of its performance enhancement suite.
