AMD's FSR 4 Redstone Ray Regeneration update finally arrives in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, which is better late than never

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Good things come to those who wait. Probably.

Black Ops 7 release times: A close up of David Mason and another character looking alarmed.
(Image credit: Activision)

I was there folks, I was there. In May of this year, AMD announced a massive new update to its upscaling tech, giving us our first glimpse of FSR 4 "Redstone" which was said to be bringing a whole host of machine learning-based improvements.

One of the key features is the addition of Ray Regeneration, which, much like Nvidia's Ray Reconstruction tech, is said to be capable of regenerating inaccurate pixels to prevent the gritty, noisy mess that can surround some ray traced lighting effects. The Redstone update was supposed to be making an appearance at some point this year, but it's been so long since we'd heard anything about it, I'd nearly forgotten it existed.

And yet, here it is. AMD has announced on X that FSR 4 Redstone Ray Regeneration will be making its debut on RX 9000-series cards in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, which will be launched *checks watch* tomorrow.

So, if you've got an RX 9070 XT, RX 9070, or RX 9060 XT, all of your rays will be reconstructed if you jump into a brand-new game of BLOPs. And enable FSR 4 in the settings, of course. It's not known yet whether you'll be able to turn Ray Regeneration on or off as a separate setting, but regardless, according to AMD it will be there to make all of your less-gritty-lighting dreams come true.

You'll also get AMD's machine learning-enhanced frame generation to play with at some point, which will hopefully solve some of the noisy frame issues experienced on earlier versions of the tech. Though we don't know exactly when that will be coming, as the accompanying video quietly notes that the frame gen fun-times will be added at some point "post-launch" via a quick caption.

I wonder how late that caveat got added to this promo video...

AMD has been significantly behind Nvidia in the upscaling tech department to date, but with Redstone, it seems to be looking to make a large leap towards trading more evenly-matched blows with its biggest graphics competitor.

As for other games making use of the tech? We'll have to wait and see. FSR 4's adoption rate seems pretty paltry compared to DLSS 4, but it's good to see that more recent improvements seem to finally be making their way into our games. Or one of them, anyway. It's a start, okay? No-one said this would be easy.

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Andy Edser
Andy Edser
Hardware Writer

Andy built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 12, when IDE cables were a thing and high resolution wasn't—and he hasn't stopped since. Now working as a hardware writer for PC Gamer, Andy spends his time jumping around the world attending product launches and trade shows, all the while reviewing every bit of PC gaming hardware he can get his hands on. You name it, if it's interesting hardware he'll write words about it, with opinions and everything.

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