AMD Teases FSR Redstone With Machine Learning, Calls It A Game-Changer
Regular readers will probably know this already, but AMD's RDNA 4 GPUs are quite good at machine learning workloads. The company's FSR 4 AI-powered upscaler delivers excellent results, much closer to NVIDIA's DLSS in terms of image quality versus previous iterations of the technology. AMD isn't done trying to reverse NVIDIA's real-time game graphics processing leadership, though. At Computex, alongside the announcement of the Radeon RX 9060 XT, AMD also announced "FSR Redstone".
It's not completely clear what the name indicates—it could be a reference to the powdered material that enables the entire science of Minecraft automation—but regardless of why it's called that, FSR Redstone is the next generation of FidelityFX Super Resolution. Much as competitor NVIDIA's "DLSS" has gone far beyond upscaling, so too is FSR. 'Redstone' promises to bring Neural Radiance Caching, "Ray Regeneration", and ML-powered Frame Generation to AMD's RDNA 4 graphics hardware.
What are these technologies? Well, Ray Regeneration is fundamentally similar to NVIDIA's Ray Reconstruction, which we've covered extensively, and you're probably also familiar with the concept of "frame generation," too. Neural Radiance Caching is a method that uses real-time, "online training" AI to essentially 'remember' where the lights in a scene are, allowing for reduced noise even before the actual denoising pass, and ultimately, enabling faster, more realistic global illumination.
Having a single AI model do all of these things in combination with image upscaling means that the results are both higher-quality and also more efficient. With this kind of technology, path tracing suddenly becomes a realistic goal for gaming graphics. The AI can take the noisy output from a low-detail path tracer that's only firing one or two rays per pixel, and turn it into beautiful, natural-looking game graphics.
For context, typical offline path tracers will fire sixteen or more rays per pixel, and they'll also calculate a huge number of bounces—as many as 20, 50, or even more. Cyberpunk 2077's "RT Overdrive" mode does two bounces by default, and while NVIDIA brags that the mode does upwards of 600 ray calculations per pixel, offline path tracers may use tens of thousands of samples per pixel.
That's why all of this AI trickery is necessary—because even as powerful as modern GPUs are, even mighty over-500-watt monsters crumble under the demands of real-time path tracing. AMD says that FSR Redstone will be available in the second half of this year (2025) and that FSR4 will be natively available in "over 60 game titles" by June 5th.
