New OptiScaler Build Delivers Faster FSR 4 Upscaling On RDNA 2 Radeon GPUs
Unofficial community support for AMD's FSR 4 upscaler continues to improve, as OptiScaler FSR 4 injection for RDNA 2 GPUs now works with current AMD drivers and no longer requires reverting to older drivers to function. Fancy that!
Just last month, OptiScaler also brought FSR 4 to Vulkan games which previously had no support for FSR 4 or FSR 3 at all, leading to improved playability for games like Doom: The Dark Ages and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle that rely on both Vulkan renderers and mandatory ray tracing. This makes AMD's lack of official AMD FSR 4 support for older RDNA GPUs particularly troubling, since FSR 4 Frame Gen and improved upscaling visuals do extend the effective life of the hardware.
AMD RDNA 2 will also be a centerpiece of the upcoming Valve Steam Machine, and while evidence suggests there's no reason it couldn't support FSR 4, current drivers and a lack of an announcement from Valve suggest it may not.
For now, this OptiScaler build is only available for OptiScaler Discord members.
In addition to expanding compatibility for OptiScaler's FSR 4 injection method, the new OptiScaler update (4.0.2b) also "significantly improves" ghosting on RDNA 2 GPUs, and may even improve FSR 4 INT8 performance on NVIDIA GPUs.
In the Discord chat, OptiScaler also notes that FSR4 INT8 "seems to be sensitive to input resolution mismatch with internal models" and is "generally" caused by Unreal Engine in some way. The recommended solution is to switch from FSR 4 Quality to Balanced. To say the least, community support for AMD's RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 GPU architectures is running circles around AMD's official solutions.
Hopefully, AMD will take this as motivation to enable FSR 4 INT8 on older RDNA GPUs, at least as an optional toggle. There's really no reason why OptiScaler should be required for this functionality, but it does serve to demonstrate the incredible versatility of OptiScaler and its ability to mix-and-match upscaling technologies at will. Though to be a little critical of OptiScaler, it is slightly annoying that this release requires users to directly download it from Discord instead of being more easily available from the official GitHub page. It's clearly a development build, though, considering the 4.0.2b designation and all.
