AMD is targeting FSR 4.1 quality parity on RDNA 3 GPUs

AMD targets image quality parity with FSR 4.1 on RDNA 3 GPUs

At Computex 2026, AMD’s Chief Software Officer, Andrej Zdravkovic, and Senior Director of Software, Terry Makedon, reportedly confirmed that FSR 4.1 will look just as good on RDNA 3 GPUs as on RDNA 4 GPUs. According to TechPowerUp, FSR 4.1 will use a different model on RDNA 3 GPUs, but will deliver the same levels of image quality. RDNA 3 users will not receive a lesser version of FSR 4.1.

Today, AMD’s FSR 4.1 upscaler only works on AMD RX 9000 series (RDNA 4) graphics cards. Next month, AMD plans to bring FSR 4.1 to its RX 7000 series (RDNA 3) GPUs.

Why will FSR 4.1 be different on RDNA 3 GPUs?

AMD plans to bring FSR 4.1 to RDNA 3 GPUs in July. Until now, AMD’s FSR 4 AI upscaling models have been optimised exclusively for AMD’s RDNA 4-based GPUs. These GPUs use AMD’s 2nd generation AI accelerators, which support both FP8 and INT8 data. The 1st-generation AI accelerators in AMD’s RDNA 3 GPUs only support INT8 arithmetic.

For FSR 4.1 to work on AMD’s RDNA 3 GPUs, it needs to convert its AI models to support INT8. AMD has completed this work and ensured that the final visual output for FSR 4.1’s new INT8 version matches its output on FP8 RDNA 4 GPUs. AMD plans to release more information about this shift when it launches RDNA 3’s machine learning upscaling support next month.

FSR 4.1 on RDNA 2 is more complicated

AMD has promised to bring FSR 4.1 to its older RDNA 2 graphics cards. These GPUs lack dedicated AI accelerators, so FSR 4.1 must run on GPU compute units and stream processors. This means that it needs to run on pure GPU compute, not dedicated AI compute. This change requires larger changes to AMD’s AI models, and more optimisation from AMD’s software division.

FSR 4.1 will come to AMD RDNA 2 GPUs in “early 2027”. To make FSR 4.1 worthwhile on older GPUs, AMD will need to minimise the number of GPU cycles FSR 4.1 uses without lowering image quality.

FSR 4.1 everywhere, almost

If AMD succeeds, FSR 4.1 should be available on all of AMD’s DirectX 12 Ultimate graphics cards. That said, it remains to be seen how performance FSR 4 will be on AMD’s older GPU architectures. Will FSR 4.1 continue to run fastest on RDNA 4 GPUs? Will AMD’s optimisations impact FSR 4.1 on RDNA 4? Could AMD’s RDNA 2 version of FSR 4.1 be utilised on consoles? We expect to learn the answers to these questions in time.

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