Join The Club
After accidentally dropping its source code on GitHub last year and kicking the door wide open for modders, AMD has done something exactly what it promised to: It's added support for FSR 4.1 to Radeon RX 7000-series graphics cards in its latest Adrenalin drivers.
The 26.2.2 driver set doesn't come with many other goodies (game support for Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced and Doom: The Dark Ages | Revelations), but I don't think many Team Red fans will care all that much, because FSR 4.1 is considerably more noteworthy. Compared to FSR 3, the quality of the AI-powered upscaling and frame generation is clearly superior and almost on par with Nvidia's DLSS 4.5 suite.
Back in May, AMD promised it would bring its best FSR algorithms to RDNA 3 cards in June, and true to its word, that's exactly what it has done. Unless a game has native support for FSR 4.1, you'll need to enable it via an override in Adrenalin (which does require the game to have a native FSR 3.1 implementation).
Something else worth noting is that RDNA 3-based FSR 4.1 is likely to be less performant than the RDNA 4-based one. I say 'likely' as I've not had the chance to test it yet, but simply going on the fact that the matrix operations ability of RX 7000 cards is far lower than that of RX 9000 ones, something has to give.
That means you're either going to get the same kind of performance uplift but not quite the same visual fidelity, or vice versa, when comparing FSR 4.1 on a Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 7800 XT, for example. Don't misunderstand me: Switching on FSR 4.1 with an RDNA 3 card will still give a performance boost, but the end result won't be quite as impressive as it is on an RDNA 4 one.
Still, it'll be nicer on the eyes than FSR 3.1, no matter how different it all is. And if you have an RX 6000-series graphics card, then it's worth noting that AMD said that it'll bring FSR 4.1 to that platform next year. Yes, that's a long ol' wait, but given how yucky prices for PC parts are right now, I should imagine a good number of RDNA 2 users will be clinging on to those cards for a good while longer anyway.
You might wonder what was so specific about the June date for RDNA 3 FSR 4.1, and now that the Steam Machine has been released, we know exactly why: Valve is working with AMD to add the fancy algorithms to its little box of underwhelm, although "coming soon" is the only commitment we've got for a release date.
1. Best overall: AMD Radeon RX 9070
2. Best value: AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16 GB
3. Best budget: Nvidia RTX 5050
4. Best mid-range: AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT
5. Best high-end: Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090
