AMD Catches Heat As Modders Bring FSR 4 To Vulkan Games

AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution is no more; the product has been renamed to simply "FSR" as it encompasses more technologies than just "super resolution". Even still, image upscaling remains the most notable part of the package, and FSR 4 represents a considerable step forward in terms of image quality over older versions. So it goes that people would naturally want to use FSR 4 on the latest games, but if they were based on the Vulkan graphics APi, you were out of luck until today.

The good news comes not in the form of an announcement from AMD, but instead from the OptiScaler team, although it's not exactly an announcement. In fact, it's not even official yet, but nevertheless that didn't stop Reddit users from getting very excited about a line buried in the OptiScaler "v0.9.0-pre10 Test Build" changelog:

Added Vulkan w/Dx12 support – FSR4 VK w/Dx12, FSR 2.1 VK w/Dx12

In other posts on Reddit, Folks have already begun testing the new build on games like Indiana Jones and the Great Circle as well as Doom: The Dark Ages, both games fundamentally based on Id Software technology—as Id Software is the only company still putting out games that are "Vulkan-only," meaning they can't be played with any other graphics API. That disqualified them from FSR4 support until now, as AMD's FSR4 override in the Adrenalin control panel (which replaces FSR3 in games with FSR4) doesn't work in Vulkan titles.


The results are extremely promising. Redditor /u/EtaLasquera posted a video of running Indiana Jones on his Radeon RX 6800 XT with FSR4 upscaling, a doubly unsupported configuration given that neither Vulkan nor RDNA2 are supported with FSR4. Indeed, despite using the leaked INT8 version of FSR4, he's achieving solid performance and excellent visuals in the ray-tracing-required MachineGames release.

There's a lot of antipathy toward AMD in the comments on Reddit and it's not hard to understand why. Radeon users really have been left in the lurch a bit by AMD. FSR4 is legitimately good and it's cool to see AMD pushing forward with tech like FSR Redstone, but those technologies don't matter unless developers integrate them into their games. FSR4 is a tech that Radeon gamers can enjoy right now, and AMD's apparent unwillingness to proliferate the tech across APIs and architectures (despite proof from the community that it is possible) is starting to look a little negligent.

If you'd like to try out the new version of OptiScaler for yourself, keep in mind that this constitutes game modding and so it will absolutely get you banned from online games. As long as you're OK with the risks, you can grab the beta version from this Reddit post, and head over to the OptiScaler GitHub to learn how to set it up and install it.