In the space of just a few days, things have been getting pretty hectic at AMD!
For months now, AMD has been following NVIDIA's lead in stating that its latest technologies for improving the visual rendering of our video games are reserved for its most powerful graphics chips. In fact, FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 - now known as FSR Redstone or FSR 4.1 - is simply incompatible with Radeon RX 6000 and 7000 series graphics cards in RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 architectures. These two architectures would not be technically equipped enough for FSR Redstone to run on them. However, AMD's well-oiled communication hit a snag with the unintentional publication of FSR Redstone's source code last August.
Indeed, in the wake of this publication, clever users managed to get FSR Redstone running first on Radeon RX 7000 series and then even on Radeon RX 6000 series! For the record, they achieved this by imposing the use of the INT8 instruction set - understood by Radeon in RDNA 2 RDNA 3 - in place of the FP8 instruction set normally used by AMD. This switchover was not without consequences: some (rare) games stubbornly refused to launch, and performance dropped by 5-10% depending on the card and video game used. However, the visual gain more than made up for this.
Such was the benefit that, several months later, AMD realized the obvious: FSR Redstone had to be made officially compatible with RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 graphics solutions, which, incidentally, are the ones used on the current Steam Deck and the future Steam Machine. A few days ago, AMD published a clear statement confirming that FSR Redstone would be arriving on RDNA 3 as early as next July, and on RDNA 2 a little later, at the beginning of next year. In both cases, we can expect graphics drivers to be updated to support this embellishment technology.
AMD confirms the imminent arrival of FSR 4.1 on RDNA 3 and RDNA 2 GPUs © AMD
In a nod to the clever people who managed to get FSR Redstone running on RDNA 3 and RDNA 2 back in September, AMD seems to be using a very similar technique: to get everything working, the INT8 instruction set is used instead of the FP8 used by Radeon RX 9000 series graphics cards (RDNA 4). Let's just hope that if AMD has taken its time, it's to minimize the impact on performance and reduce the rare incompatibilities observed to a bare minimum.
