What is AMD FSR?

AMD launched FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) in June of 2021 as AMD's image upscaling and frame-generation technology. It is designed to improve gaming performance while maintaining a high level of Visual quality.

Instead of rendering every frame in high resolution it renders a frame in a lower resolution and then reconstructs it into a higher resolution version. For example, it can render a 1080p image and reconstruct it to 4K in less time than it would take to render it in 4K with a minimal loss in quality. This means you get the best of both worlds, with a higher FPS and improved visuals.

One of the biggest advantages of FSR is that it will work on AMD GPUs, Nvidia, and Intel GPUs, plus even some older GPUs you wouldn't expect, so if you're rocking an Nvidia GTX 10XX series or Radeon RX400 series, you aren't totally left behind.

To make the best use of AMD FSR upscaling, we suggest checking out the RX 9070 & RX 9070XT.

FSR is a super sampling technology which basically means the following:

• The game renders a lower resolution frame (for example 1080p)
• FSR reconstructs this image into a higher resolution 9such as 1440p or 4K)
• This workload is lower than native renderings in the higher resolution resulting in a higher FPS

This sounds like DLSS, but in fact it’s very different. Where DLSS relies heavily on AI hardware. FSR started pure shader technology, making it easier to implement and explains why it works not just on AMD GPUs and allows older hardware to make use of this.

While newer iterations of FSR do make use of AI assisted techniques and temporal data, the older ones still offer a great uplift over standard rendering.

Launched in 2021, this was the first version of AMD FSR. It introduced spatial upscaling which detected the edges of objects within images on an individual frame in isolation. This means it does not refer to the previous frames and applied a sharpening pass to improve clarity. This process also has the benefit of effectively removing ghosting seen in other methods.

Due to it only accessing a single frame of data, it's very fast, lightweight, and easy to integrate into games requiring a minimal amount of work by developers. It does have its downsides though, at times creating blurred or over sharpened images

Another benefit is that as FSR 1.0 is a shader technology, so it's not bound to AMD GPUs and works on both Nvidia and Intel GPUs including some surprisingly lower spec and older cards, as the hardware requirements are extremely low.

Following on from FSR 1.0 oddly enough is FSR 2.0. Released in 2022, this is a major step forward. With this version we move into the world of temporal upscaling, which is a fancy way of saying it uses data from previous frames. As with FSR 1.0 frames are rendered at a lower resolution and upscaled close to 4K. While this is the same as the previous version the change, here it will use motion vectors and depth information given to it from the game engine.

This allows it to track an object rebuilding the fine details that can become lost in moving and reducing the jagged edges and flickering and keeps motion blur as a blur and not treating it as a render artifact.

With this update, AMD further enhanced visual performance using the advanced upscaler and frame generation tools from previous iterations, improving them and adding a new features.

Key amongst these is Fluid Motion Frames or FMF for short. This creates new frames between the rendered ones which can massively boost the perceived FPS and dramatically reduce in game stutter by effectively filling in the gaps between the frames making a smoother overall feel. They have also made improvements to the Motion Vector handling introduced in FSR 2.0 to improve image stability and reduce ghosting.

To help combat the potential for in-game latency from frame generation, AMD also introduced AMD Anti-Lag+. This is a driver-based tool for AMD cards which synchronizes the CPU and GPU pacing to stop the CPU getting to far ahead processing frames. What this means for us playing games is that our inputs feel snappier.

Lastly with this update, a lot of these features became modular, meaning you can turn off selected parts to suit your needs within the AMD Adrenalin software.

In this version of FSR introduces four new technologies optimized for the RX 9000 series GPUs and with the updated 2026 SDK (FSR 4.1), it enables these for the RX 7000 series GPU. We have broken these down below as they are a significant update over the older analytical rendering system.

• FSR Upscaling

Formally known as FSR 4, this behaves similarly to previous generations by rendering a lower resolution frame and upscaling it into 4K, the key difference is now it makes use of machine learning or ML for short as opposed to the older analytical upscale solution. This results in sharper detail and more stable motion with less ghosting than previous versions.

• FSR Frame Generation

A new addition making use of machine learning frame interpolation to predict and insert new frames between rendered ones. It can predict where an object should be between the two rendered frames resulting in a dramatic uplift in perceived smoothness and FPS. (at the expense of some accuracy)

• FSR Ray Regeneration

A neural network denoiser which restores the quality of ray traced detail from areas with poor or low amounts of data. This reduces the graining effect or noise on surfaces and means it can reduce the amount of work needed to render the scene meaning less wasted effort a better, smoother experience.

• FSR Radiance Caching

This is another neural tool, which learns how light behaves in a low-light environment and helps it predict the global illumination more efficiently. This coupled with FSR Ray Regeneration means a massive saving in the processing of ray-traced lighting.

AMDs latest update, taking the Redstone suite of features and refining them further, improving performance for both RX 9000 GPUs using FP8 acceleration (floating point 8-bit) and re-engineering it for RX 7000 GPUs using INT8 Precision (integral point 8-bit). These numerical formats are used in machine as a learning interface, being 8-bit.

This makes them incredibly fast to process compared to other versions. This means faster processing, lower memory usage and a faster interface for real time rendering causing less desyncs between the rendered and prepared frames.

Both versions result in a similar image quality. These also give a healthy boost in performance, visual stability, temporal stability, and near native sharpness. This means in some scenarios you may see between 40-50% performance gains at 4K when using FSR 4.1 vs older solutions.

• FSR Upscaling 4.1.1

This introduces full support for RDNA 3 GPUs (the RX 7000 series.) Previously only some of these features would have been supported. AMD have also confirmed plans for a lightweight version for the RDNA2 GPUS (RX 6000 series)

• FSR Ray Regeneration 1.2

An update to AMD's noise reduction tool introduced with the Redstone suite focusing on quality improvements and adding optional ambient and specular occlusion denoising.

Currently this feature is only available to a handful of titles, notably Call of Duty Black Ops 7 and Crimson desert support this.

• FSR 1.0 – Spatial upscaling. Fast, basic, lightweight works on all GPUs brands
• FSR 2.0 – Temporal upscaling (major quality boost)
• FSR 3.0 – Addition of analytical frame generation
• FSR 3.1 – Improvements to flexibility and quality
• AMD FSR Upscaling (Redstone) – AI-driven rendering technologies
• AMD FSR Upscaling 4.1 – improved support for RX 7000 GPUs