AMD has lifted the lid on its latest AI tech for gaming, which promises to finally bring multi-frame gen to its FSR suite, as well as next-gen ray regeneration for path tracing. It’s called FSR Diamond, and it’s been unveiled as part of the tech powering the Microsoft Xbox Helix console project. However, it looks as though there’s a big fly in the ointment – FSR Diamond is apparently exclusive to RDNA 5 GPUs, meaning it won’t work on any existing Radeon cards.
The latter information comes courtesy of regular tech leaker Kepler_L2 on X. In response to a post about FSR Diamond from tech site Videocardz, asking “is it RDNA 5 exclusive?” Kepler_L2 simply replied “yes.”
Adding some context further down the thread, the leaker added that “They [AMD] need to use new AI/ML accel [acceleration] features of RDNA5 to achieve a meaningful improvement in performance and quality, and that makes porting to older architectures hard.”
This wouldn’t be the first time AMD has had trouble porting new tech to older architectures. It’s now been over a year since we first saw FSR 4 with the Radeon RX 9070 XT release in March 2025, but there’s still no sign of the tech being ported to older GPUs based on the RDNA 3 architecture.
The main problem is that FSR 4 is heavily optimised for FP32 hardware, rather than the lower-precision INT8 hardware found in RDNA 3 GPUs’ matrix AI cores. It can be done, as proved by modders who’ve got FSR 4 working on older GPUs, but we’ve still yet to hear anything official about it from AMD.
That’s going to be very frustrating if you spent a lot of money on a Radeon RX 7900 XTX a couple of years ago, and you still have to use FSR 3 if you want to improve performance with upscaling. FSR 4 looks significantly better than FSR 3 in action, with vastly superior image quality, while FSR 3 comparatively displays a lot of digital artefacts and blurriness, particularly in fast motion.
If what Kepler_L2 says is true, though, even AMD’s latest RDNA 4 GPUs, such as the Radeon RX 9060 XT, won’t be able to run FSR Diamond. Comparatively, Nvidia’s latest DLSS transformer model for upscaling works across the whole GeForce RTX GPU suite, although it does run notably slower on RTX 30 and 20-series GPUs, as they lack native FP8 support. Multi frame gen is limited to Nvidia’s current-gen RTX 50-series GPUs, however.
As always with leaks, bear in mind that none of the information about PC GPU support for FSR Diamond has been officially confirmed by AMD, and can only be considered a rumour at this stage. AMD has confirmed some details about FSR Diamond, though.
What’s in AMD FSR Diamond?
According to a post on X by AMD’s SVP and GM of computing and graphics, Jack Huynh, FSR Diamond is “designed to be natively optimized for Project Helix and deeply integrated into the GDK.” Huynh lists the following bullet points:
• Built for next-gen neural rendering
• Next-gen ML-based upscaling
• New ML-based multi-frame generation
• Next-gen Ray Regeneration for RT & Path Tracing
One of the key new features here is multi frame gen (MFG), which has so far only been offered by Nvidia and Intel. It’s notable that Huynh has also stressed that AMD’s implementation of MFG is “ML-based,” where ML stands for machine learning. Given the massive improvement in quality we’ve seen between early, non-ML FSR upscaling and frame gen tech, and the latest versions we’ve seen in FSR Redstone, this should hopefully mean AMD MFG works well.
While AMD has played a good game of catch-up with Nvidia when it comes to ray tracing, its current GPUs also lag behind the competition when it comes to path tracing, and its ray regeneration tech is featured in very few games compared with Nvidia’s DLSS ray reconstruction.
Perhaps RDNA 5 and FSR Diamond will see AMD finally competing on a level footing with Nvidia, although it will be very frustrating if this new tech can’t be used on existing RDNA 4 GPUs. For the moment, AMD is only discussing FSR Diamond in relation to Xbox Helix, so it’s quite possible the company will have a different strategy when it comes to PC GPUs.
This is all a fair way off, though. In the meantime, if you want to upgrade your graphics card now, take a look at our guide to buying the best GPU, where we take you through all the top options at a range of budgets.
