Call them FSR 4, FSR Redstone, FSR Whatever, AMD's latest generation of AI-enhanced upscaling technologies are definitely a major step forward. Which makes it a great pity that they're not available for older generations of AMD GPUs, like RDNA 3. The just possibly good news is that, in a new interview, AMD has left the door ever so slightly ajar for that happening in future.
Speaking with PC World, Andrej Zdravkovic, Senior Vice President at AMD and the guy responsible for various driver features, including FSR upscaling technologies, explained that the lack of official support for the latest FSR tech on RDNA 3 basically comes down to the difficulty in delivering a consistent experience.
But when asked if there could be "an opportunity to make a beta version of Redstone that will run on RDNA 3," his answer is at least a little promising.
"That's currently not in the plan, but thanks for the hint. We may want to think about something like that and provide that to people who want to play with that. The challenge is always how to clearly define that," Zdravkovic says.
Without being overly optimistic, that's definitely not a "no."
Of course, there are good technical reasons why it's tricky to get the new features running on older GPUs. There are hardware differences between RDNA 3 GPUs, like the Radeon RX 7800 XT and newer RDNA 4 graphics cards, including the RX 9070 XT when it comes to machine learning acceleration. This means it's simply not possible to achieve the same performance on the older GPU generation. The code can be made to run, just not as well.
At what point "not as well" becomes bad enough that the feature becomes worthless is a subjective call, of course. So, the point being made here is that maybe it would be nice to allow end users to make that call.
AMD's concern is no doubt a combination of not wanting to deal with support issues thrown up by a half-baked and poorly performing set of features and, likewise, concerns over the impression it will give of overall product quality.
Of course, what would be really interesting is if AMD could add a little of its technical nous to supporting newer upscaling tech on older GPUs and get it all running a bit better than the community efforts have managed thus far.
For now, AMD isn't committing to anything like that or, indeed, committing to anything at all. So all I can say is, here's hoping!
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