FSR 4 Tested on Older Radeon GPUs: Enhances Image Quality With Minimal Performance Impact

AMD FSR 4 Leaks Lead to Community Ports for Older RDNA GPUs

AMD’s recent leak of its FSR 4 (FidelityFX Super Resolution 4) libraries on the GPUOpen GitHub repository has sparked significant interest within the gaming and modding communities. Notably, these leaked libraries include support for older hardware, opening the door for modders to experiment with bringing FSR 4 to previous-generation RDNA GPUs.

Shortly after the leak, a resourceful Reddit user and modder published a detailed guide on implementing FSR 4 in games running on RDNA 2 GPUs. The guide demonstrates that while FSR 4 can be enabled on these older graphics cards, users should expect a trade-off: improved image quality comes at the expense of some performance. The process is not entirely straightforward, often requiring the use of outdated drivers and manual adjustments to configuration files, such as renaming DLL files, to get the upscaling technology working correctly.

FSR 4 Performance and Image Quality on RDNA 2 and RDNA 3

Both community reports and independent testing by Computerbase highlight the performance and visual improvements FSR 4 brings to the table. In their benchmarks, Computerbase tested Cyberpunk 2077 at 4K resolution with Ultra settings on an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX. The results showed that FSR 4 delivered an 11% performance boost over native rendering, though it still lagged behind FSR 3.1 by about 16% in terms of frame rates.

The Reddit modder’s own tests, conducted on an AMD RX 6950 XT, covered various FSR 4 quality presets. Even at the “Quality” setting, the RDNA 2 GPU achieved approximately 10% better performance compared to native rendering in The Last of Us Part 2 at 1440p. Both sources noted that FSR 4’s image quality is a clear step up from FSR 3, and it also demonstrated greater stability than Intel’s XeSS upscaling solution. However, XeSS did outperform FSR 4 on RDNA 2 in The Last of Us Part 2 by up to 10%, depending on the chosen quality preset.

Comparing FSR 4 Library Variants and Upscaling Technologies

Interestingly, similar performance differences were observed when comparing unofficial INT8 FSR 4 libraries on RDNA 4 hardware to the officially supported FP8 libraries. The performance gap between FSR 3.1 and FSR 4 remains consistent across these tests, suggesting that while FSR 4 brings notable image quality improvements, its performance gains are more incremental.

As the community continues to experiment with these leaked FSR 4 libraries, users of older RDNA GPUs now have new opportunities to enhance their gaming experience, provided they are willing to navigate the technical challenges involved in unofficial implementations.