AMD FSR 4 on RX 9070 shows massive improvements early analysis

AMD's CES RDNA 4 announcement was a particularly strange one, with Team Red releasing information about the new graphics card generation in drips and drabs following the official announcement. Now, independent testing by Hardware Unboxed on YouTube (watch the full video below) has more or less confirmed many of AMD's claimed performance and quality improvements. 

The Hardware Unboxed team was able to get a brief look at the performance and quality of AMD's FSR 4 compared to FSR 3.1 on the CES 2025 show floor, with both demo machines running Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart on AMD's new Radeon RX 9070 GPUs. What Hardware Unboxed observed was a significant improvement in upscaling quality, including crisper edges, better antialiasing, and fewer visual artefacts overall. 

On top of there being visual improvements, those visual improvements were noticeable in 4K Performance mode, which has not been FSR's strong point in previous testing. The biggest improvement that's immediately noticeable is in small, rapidly moving details, like particles, where FSR 3.1 struggles to parse edges, leading to pixelation and muddy details. The same is true for the fur on Ratchet, with FSR 4 rendering the hair texture with much more detail than FSR 3.1, despite there still being some smoothing taking place. 

Far-away elements with fine details, like the guard rails in the stands where the crowd is in the example footage, are also rendered far more clearly using FSR 4 than FSR 3.1. Reflections, transparent surfaces, and holographic effects are more areas where improvements are clear, with less detail distortion taking place when using FSR 4. 

One of the biggest changes to FSR 4 is that the upscaling tech is now based on machine learning, similarly to Nvidia's DLSS, which has, until now, generally been thought to be superior to AMD's solution. If AMD's FSR 4 can pull off improved quality, as indicated by the Hardware Unboxed testing, it could be a game changer for upcoming gaming handhelds featuring RDNA 3.5 iGPUs — as long as AMD allows FSR 4 to run on those iGPUs, since it's currently limited to RDNA 4. 

Of course, this analysis was performed in one game exclusively, and in one scene of one game, to boot, so it may not be entirely representative of overall performance. Still, it's impressive to see AMD making large strides like this when it comes to AI-enhanced upscaling. AMD's Radeon RX 9070 XT and other 9070 series GPUs are expected to be available at some time in Q1 2025. 

In the meantime, check out the AMD Ryzen 9 9800X3D (curr. $479 on Amazon) for your next PC build.