AMD FSR 4 Confirmed for Older GPUs, July Launch Set for RDNA 3

Gamer frustration with AMD has been high over the last few months as the company continued to introduce new graphics technologies that were exclusive to its latest-generation Radeon RX 9000-series GPUs while leaving buyers of its popular RX 6000 and RX 7000-series cards in the lurch. Well, AMD's Jack Huynh has announced that FSR Upscaling 4.x, arguably the most important part of FSR Redstone, will be coming to RDNA 3 and RDNA 2 GPUs in an official capacity.

A lot of factors have combined over time to irritate AMD gamers. FSR 4 coming exclusively to the new-generation RDNA 4 GPUs was an issue, but this was magnified by early pricing issues and poor availability for the Radeon RX 9000 series GPUs. It also looked especially bad next to NVIDIA bringing its latest-generation upscaler models to GPUs going as far back as the GeForce RTX 2000 series. To make matters worse, AMD accidentally leaked a version of FSR 4 that can be run on the older GPUs, albeit at a significant performance penalty. Still, it proved that porting the tech was possible, leaving AMD fans wondering why AMD had left them out in the cold, as the new tech is vastly superior to AMD's previous-generation upscalers.


So this announcement from AMD's Jack Huynh, SVP & GM of Computing & Graphics, is quite welcome. He says players on RDNA 3 GPUs (the Radeon RX 7000 family) will get "FSR Upscaling 4.1" in July, which is interesting as the last we heard was that AMD was going to stop using version numbers like that, but we're glad that's not actually the case. Then, RDNA 2 players (Radeon RX 6000 series) will apparently get access to the tech in "early 2027." That seems late considering that those cards came out way back in 2020, but better late than never.


The real question is whether this is too little, too late for Radeon users. Most replies under Huynh's tweet are from frustrated fans who are unhappy with AMD for taking so long to make any sort of announcement about this, many of whom have already moved on to GeForce graphics cards. There are also numerous console gamers wondering when their machines will get the tech too. This might seem silly, but Huynh himself mentions them when he remarks that AMD's tech powers "1 billion gamers." Most games on PS5 and Xbox Series are stuck with FSR 3 upscaling, currently.


Because the older GPUs lack the necessary acceleration hardware for the version of FSR 4 used with the Radeon RX 9000 series, the leaked version of FSR 4 does not perform particularly well on RDNA 3 graphics cards, and it's slow enough on RDNA 2 that it's arguably not worth using. Hopefully this official release of the tech from AMD will offer improved performance from architecture-specific optimizations alongside improved visual fidelity thanks to improvements in the original FSR 4.0 model with FSR 4.1. We'll see in July when it initially launches for RDNA3-based Radeon GPUs.