AMD confirms that its FSR 4 upscaling technology is exclusive to RX 9000 Series GPUs. The first models in this GPU family—the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT—are on available March 6th.

FidelityFX Super Resolution or “FSR” is an algorithm that increases the resolution of PC games while minimizing GPU resource usage. The idea is pretty simple; your graphics card renders a game at fairly low resolution, and FSR bumps the picture up to 1440p or 4K. This frees up the card’s bandwidth, making it easier to achieve high, stable frame rates.

Several generations of AMD graphics card offer FSR processing, and the NVIDIA equivalent to this algorithm, called DLSS, is fairly well-known even outside of the PC gaming community.

The new FSR 4 algorithm delivers a “substantial image quality improvement” over FSR 3.1, according to AMD. It’s more stable, it’s better at preserving detail, and it’s less prone to ghosting or other artifacts.

Naturally, AMD provided some side-by-side examples of FSR 4 at its livestreamed RX 9000 Series launch event. It’s hard to judge the visual quality of this upscaling algorithm when viewed through the fog of a low-res YouTube video, but all in all, it looks good. AMD claims that FSR 4 can achieve an impressive 4x frame rate increase in some 4K games, though real-world results will vary from game to game and are subject to a number of factors, including your hardware configuration.

We’ll gain a much better understanding of FSR 4 performance after gamers get their hands on new RX 9000 Series graphics cards. Though I’d like to point out that this is the first version of FSR to utilize the new FP8 Wave Matrix Multiply Accumulate (WMMA) feature of RDNA 4. This form of hardware acceleration, which is mirrored in some recent NVIDIA GPUs, almost certainly improves FSR stability and quality.

Unfortunately, FP8 Wave Matrix Multiply Accumulate (WMMA) is exclusive to the RDNA 4 platform. The only AMD GPUs that utilize this platform are the RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT. As a result, FSR 4 doesn’t work on older AMD GPUs.

AMD previously stated that it would attempt to optimize FSR 4 for the RDNA 3 architecture. However, the RX 9000 Series announcement makes no mention of such an effort. I don’t have a crystal ball, but I assume that some FSR 4 improvements will eventually trickle down to RDNA 3 hardware, possibly as a FSR 3.X release.

Most gamers will shrug this off. AI upscaling is a divisive topic, for one, but it’s also requires developer implementation, so it isn’t supported in all games. That said, an improved upscaling algorithm could extend the lifetime of older AMD GPUs, which is very attractive prospect, particularly when it comes to the Steam Deck and other mobile devices.

The good news, at least for desktop gamers, is that AMD’s first RX 9000 Series cards offer a nice price-to-performance ratio. At $600, the RX 9070 XT’s benchmarks are comparable to that of the $750 RTX 5070 Ti. AMD also claims that it is taking steps to prevent supply shortages, which will (hopefully) curb scalpers and ensure wide availability.

AMD’s RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT cost $550 and $600, respectively. Partner brands like Acer and Gigabyte will begin selling RX 9000 Series cards on March 6th, and AMD expects these brands to honor MSRP. The FSR 4 algorithm will support about 30 games at launch, and developers who are already using FSR 3.1 should have no trouble implementing the new algorithm, per AMD.

Source: AMD