FSR 4 may be a simple upgrade for FSR 3.1 games according to leaks, which hopefully means we won't see a repeat of FSR 3's poorly-supported launch
I remember the FSR 3 launch. While AMD's version of Frame Generation was a boon for those of us not on Nvidia GPUs, the supported games list was made up of, err, two entries. Hopefully that won't be the case with FSR 4, however, as according to a reliable source of leaks, when it comes to backwards compatibility, "it should just work."
Exactly how it "should just work" is currently unclear (via Wccftech). According to @Kepler_L2, one of the more reliable leakers of modern times, AMD's RDNA 4 driver will simply replace the FSR 3.1 DLL with FSR 4. Whether that's applied by default on all FSR 3.1-supported games, or a manual, game-by-game process, is up for debate.
Yeah, it should just work™️January 25, 2025
AMD hinted at this in its slide presentation for CES 2025, which announced both FSR 4 and the RX 9070-series GPUs (even if AMD technically didn't in the briefing that followed). The bottom of the FSR 4 slide says: "AMD FSR 4 upgrade feature only available on AMD Radeon RX 9070 series graphics for supported games with AMD FSR 3.1 already integrated."
So, an "upgrade feature." That certainly sounds like some form of integrated backwards compatibility to me, although it's possible you might have to go through your FSR 3.1 games in the driver itself and swish a slider, or something to that equivalent.
Still, I hope this rumour proves to be true. Button-press backwards compatibility for upscalers has become a lot easier since Nvidia introduced the option to switch over the DLSS version within its Nvidia app as part of the rollout for DLSS 4.
It makes sense that AMD would try and do the same, meaning we could be looking at simple upscaler swapping in previously supported games from both major GPU manufacturers in future.
Speaking of DLSS 4, well, there's tough competition for AMD ahead. My hardware overlord, Dave James, has been pretty impressed with what he's seen of DLSS 4, including in his testing of the RTX 5090. It's not perfect, but Multi Frame Generation has some serious framerate boosting chops—and the new transformer-based upscaling looks mostly excellent in motion.
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FSR 3.1, on the other hand, didn't quite bring the image quality improvements I was hoping for compared to previous iterations, even if it did perform relatively well in my upscaler testing showdown—at Quality settings at least.
Now FSR 4 has been buffed with machine-learning doohickeys (and presumably some on-card hardware to run them), here's hoping AMD has managed to catch up. You'll need an RX 9070-series card to play with the new tech, at the very least.
AMD will certainly be hoping that FSR 4 makes a difference, given the competitive price point that Nvidia has set the RTX 5070 at. $549 for a card that promises "RTX 4090 level performance" thanks to DLSS 4? The red team's own mid-range efforts look like they'll have to work hard to beat it—and we can only hope the pricing and upscaling performance makes for a strong competitor.
The upscaling battles seem to be beginning once more, at least, and we'll be testing both to see which emerges victorious.