In short: AMD’s new FSR 4 upscaling answer improves tremendously upon FSR 3 however solely helps the corporate’s Radeon RX 9070 and 9060 graphics card households. Nonetheless, the most recent model of Mesa for Linux gives a loophole that allowed a modder to benchmark FSR 4 on an older GPU, with intriguing outcomes.
Redditor Digital-Cobbler-9930 lately shared encouraging knowledge after testing AMD’s FSR 4 on a Radeon RX 7900 XTX, which the brand new upscaling know-how does not formally help. Whereas the FSR 4 hack incurs a big efficiency penalty in comparison with FSR 3, it considerably improves picture high quality and nonetheless achieves increased body charges than native decision.
FSR 4, which switches from FSR 3’s spatial methodology to a machine studying methodology resembling Nvidia’s DLSS, requires FP8 computation, which AMD launched with the RDNA 4 structure in its RX 9070 and 9060 graphics playing cards. A current replace to Mesa for Linux allows FP8 emulation via FP16, which the sooner RDNA 3-based RX 7000 GPUs help.
FSR4 on RDNA3 (7900xtx) assessments
byu/Digital-Cobbler-9930 inradeon
From there, Digital-Cobbler changed the upscaling directions in a number of video games utilizing Optiscaler, a program that may hack FSR 4 into any title that helps DLSS 2, FSR 2, or XeSS. Presently, FSR 4’s largest weak spot is its restricted official adoption in comparison with DLSS, however Optiscaler extends the performance to over 200 extra video games, making it extremely helpful for RDNA 4 GPU homeowners. Whereas different strategies exist, Optiscaler is probably going easier.
Additionally Learn: AMD FSR 4 is Very Spectacular: 1440p Upscaling Examined
Because the FP8 emulation loophole at the moment solely works in Linux, Digital-Cobbler examined it by operating Home windows video games via the Proton compatibility layer on Arch Linux, the identical know-how that underpins SteamOS. Whereas FSR 4’s efficiency value on RDNA 3 in Home windows stays unclear, like-for-like comparisons in Linux nonetheless present clear advantages.
In 4K with high quality upscaling at most settings with out ray tracing, the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark reported 56 frames per second with FSR 4 in comparison with 85fps with FSR 3. Nonetheless, Digital-Cobbler believes that the picture high quality enchancment justifies the roughly 20fps sacrifice. Moreover, FSR 4 nonetheless gives noticeable efficiency financial savings, as native 4K drags the typical framerate right down to 42fps. Oblivion Remastered underneath related situations reveals a 10fps distinction between FSR 3 and 4, considerably enhancing movement readability in change.
The draw back is that the efficiency advantages of modding FSR 4 into RDNA 3 considerably diminish at decrease resolutions. Whereas the take a look at means that eventualities exist the place AMD may justify formally bringing its newest upscaling know-how to older GPUs, these conditions can be restricted.