OptiScaler has been updated to theoretically support AMD's FSR 4 in all games with upscaling that don't use Vulkan or anti-cheat—which is nice, but why the heck doesn't AMD do this?

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FSR 4 is great, which is why the limited game support is so disappointing.

A slide from an AMD presentation showing Space Marine 2 running at 3.5x the frame rate at 4K with FSR 4 and frame generation enabled
(Image credit: AMD)

When it comes to image quality, the latest FSR 4 iteration of its upscaling technology definitely made AMD highly competitive with Nvidia's DLSS. But game support? Not so much. Which is why the OptiScaler tool is so handy. And so vexing when it comes to AMD itself.

OptiScaler has been updated so that it now effectively supports running AMD's FSR 4 in any game that supports DLSS 2+ or FSR 2+ and doesn't use the Vulkan API or anti-cheat technology.

Regardless of how you turn it on, you'll need an RDNA 4 GPU like the 9070 XT to run FSR 4. (Image credit: Future)

It's frustrating because FSR 4, with its transition to AI-powered upscaling, was a major step forward for AMD. By most analyses, FSR 4's image quality falls somewhere Nvidia's DLSS 3 and its latest transformer-based DLSS 4 upscaling. FSR 3, by contrast, is generally viewed to be inferior to DLSS 3.

So, AMD has done all the difficult, expensive work getting FSR 4 developed and running nicely, only to skimp at the final implementation and game support, thereby doing a pretty effective job of undermining it.

A cynic might argue that AMD has form when it comes to this sort thing. Developing great hardware and software and then not quite finishing the job doesn't feel totally novel for AMD.

Anywho, the good news is that you may well have an option for trying to get FSR 4 running on your favourite title, provided it didn't fall at the Vulkan or anti-cheat hurdle. And if it's a game you spend a lot of time on, the slight phaff of the initial setup via OptiScaler is hardly the end of the world.

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Jeremy Laird
Jeremy Laird
Hardware writer

Jeremy has been writing about technology and PCs since the 90nm Netburst era (Google it!) and enjoys nothing more than a serious dissertation on the finer points of monitor input lag and overshoot followed by a forensic examination of advanced lithography. Or maybe he just likes machines that go “ping!” He also has a thing for tennis and cars.

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