AMD has announced availability of its FSR 4.1.2 Game Development Kit (GDK) for Xbox Series X/S consoles and ROG Xbox Ally handhelds. This is a huge milestone for Xbox, as it means it’s finally catching up with Sony’s PlayStation 5, which has enjoyed PSSR upscaling based on machine learning (ML) since November 2024.
Until now, Xbox game developers had to rely on old school analytic FSR implementations, which suffered from poor quality compared to upscaling technologies based on machine learning. By bringing FSR 4.1.2’s GDK to developers, the image quality of both existing and future games should see a noticeable improvement, perhaps surpassing Sony’s PSSR. The latter has long been an advantage for PlayStation 5 consoles, allowing them to offer great image quality while maintaining higher performance than previously.
AMD is offering two FSR models to suit different hardware capabilities. The first is a full upscaling model based on the INT8 quantisation type, equivalent to the standard FSR 4.1.2 implementation, while the second is a new efficiency-focused Lite INT8 model. The latter is half the size of the full model and thus requires less GPU processing time, which makes it ideal for low-performance machines such as ROG Xbox handhelds.
Both models are compatible with either console, giving developers more flexibility to choose the best model for their quality and performance targets. That said, these models have the same memory requirements, since VRAM allocation depends on rendering and output resolutions rather than model size. On Windows-powered devices, like the ROG Xbox Ally, developers can integrate FSR Upscaling 4.1.2 through the standard AMD FSR SDK.
The upscaler takes the same inputs developers already provide for FSR on PC, meaning jittered colour, depth, and motion vectors, with an option to add a reactive mask plus a transparency and composition mask. The quality modes will also match those on PC, including Native AA, Quality, Balanced, Performance, and Ultra Performance, but it’s unclear if they will be user-adjustable.
FSR Upscaling 4.1 has just recently reached AMD’s Radeon RX 6000 graphics. So, by adding Xbox consoles to the mix, developers will have more reasons to integrate it into their games, which will also benefit PC users. All that’s left now is to wait for developers to code it into their games, hopefully including some existing titles too.
