AMD has officially brought FSR 4.1 upscaling tech to its ageing Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs, covering every desktop card across the RDNA 2 range. According to AMD, this is more than just a straight port as well, with senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s computing and graphics group, Jack Huynh, saying “we made it better.”
Based on machine learning, FSR 4 marked a huge improvement in image quality over AMD’s previous versions of FSR. However, until recently it was only available for owners of the company’s latest RDNA 4 GPUs, such as the Radeon RX 9070 XT. A few months ago, AMD finally made it possible to run FSR 4.1 on Radeon RX 7000 GPUs, and now it can finally work on even older graphics cards.
This won’t have been a straightforward port, though. Only AMD’s RDNA 4 GPUs have AI cores capable of processing full FP8 instructions required by the original model, meaning the company had to do a fair bit of optimising work to get it running on RDNA 3’s INT8 cores. Comparably, RDNA 2 GPUs have no dedicated AI hardware at all, so this is all going to be running on the shader cores.
“We didn’t just bring it over, we made it better,” claims Huynh in a video about the announcement. “We went back into the model, we tuned it, we optimised the code path, and we worked to deliver high-fidelity visuals and optimised performance across the entire range, from the 6900 series down to the 6400 series class of graphics cards.”
AMD has shown a few demos of the tech working on RDNA 2 hardware. One example is Crimson Desert on a Radeon RX 6800 XT, which runs at around 95fps with FSR 3.1 on the Quality setting and frame gen enabled. Switch over to FSR 4.1 on the Performance setting, again with frame gen, and it’s running at around 101fps.
Usually, comparing Performance to Quality mode would be an apples-to-oranges scenario, but in our experience FSR 4.1 in Performance mode looks massively better than FSR 3.1 in any of its modes, as demonstrated by our Assassin’s Creed Shadows screenshots from a Radeon RX 7900 XTX card above. We’ll have to test it for ourselves to make sure, though.
In addition, AMD has also announced that FSR 4.1 will be coming to several of its APUs, including Strix Halo and Gorgon Halo models, as well as its Ryzen Z2 Extreme and Z2A handheld chips.
AMD claims it’s developed a new model for the latter that’s half the size of the one used for desktop GPUs, and is “purpose built for this class of hardware.” There’s no word on Steam Deck support, but AMD also says it’s “working on getting it working on more APUs for the future.” In addition, Xbox consoles are also now getting access to AMD’s FSR 4.1 upscaling tech.
If you’re looking to upgrade your graphics hardware now, check out our guide to buying the best GPU for your needs.
