What you need to know about AMD’s FSR 4 “Neural Rendering Ready” upscaler
AMD promises Neural Rendering support and more with their FSR 4 upscaler
AMD has officially revealed their next-generation FSR 4 upscaler, a new AI-powered super resolution solution for the company’s RDNA 4 graphics cards. This new tech has been trained using AMD EPYC Processors and Instinct AI accelerators, and was purpose built for RDNA 4. As such, FSR 4 will only be available on RDNA 4 graphics cards at launch.
The aims of FSR 4 are simple, to increase the image quality of games using FSR upscaling. With FSR 4, games will look much better than with FSR 3.1. This means that games will look better using AMD’s new upscaler. It also means that there will be fewer image quality downsides for using FSR’s more performant upscaling levels.
FSR 4 can look better than natively rendered images
In a pre-reveal press briefing, AMD showcased FSR 4 in action and compared it to FSR 3.1 and native 4K rendering in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2. In the image below, we can see some of the downsides of AMD’s FSR solution. Note that the spires on the tower do not look great with FSR 3.1 in performance mode. With FSR 4, AMD’s Performance mode image looks better than the native 4K image.
This is one example of the image quality benefits of FSR 4. Games appear sharper, both in motion and when static. Furthermore, more detail is resolved with FSR 4, making games look much clearer.
In the below example, AMD highlighted how sharp games look with FSR 4’s performance mode, and how streaking/trailing artifacts are diminished with FSR 4. FSR 4 tackles many of the image quality downsides of FSR 3.1, making it a solid upgrade for AMD RDNA 4 users.
AMD FSR 4 Performance
With FSR 4, AMD can deliver tremendous performance increases in games using Super Resolution and Frame Generation techniques. Below, we can see 2.1x to 3.7x performance gains using FSR 4 in Performance mode with Frame Generation enabled.
With FSR 4 Super Resolution alone, AMD’s noted performance increases of 1.4x to 2x, depending on the game. Note that all of these games were played at 4K on a Radeon RX 9070 XT.
Supported Games
at launch, FSR 4 will be supported on 30+ PC games. These games will support FSR 4 thanks to their support for AMD’s “Upgradable FSR API”, which launched with FSR 3.1. In 2025, over 75 games will support FSR 4. If AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 series GPUs prove to be popular, adoption may happen at a faster rate than AMD expects.
Note that most of Sony’s recent PlayStation PC titles will support FSR 4 on day 1.
With FSR 4, AMD’s successfully mitigated one of the brand’s largest gaming downsides. DLSS’ quality advantage over FSR gave PC gamers reason to avoid the brand. Thanks to the release of FSR 4, gamers can now upgrade to AMD graphics cards without FSR’s image quality being considered a downside. That said, DLSS is available in more games. That means that AMD needs to catch up with Nvidia when it comes to game support.
You can join the discussion on AMD’s FSR 4 AI upscaling technology on the OC3D Forums.
