AMD talks FSR 4, Hypr-RX, and new Adrenalin software, FSR 4 uses proprietary model and is limited to RDNA 4 cards for now
Alongside offering performance numbers and detailing the RDNA 4 architecture in the new Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 cards, AMD is also offering a glimpse into its next generation of upscaling tech stack led by FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 4.
So far, FSR versions up to 3.1 were essentially just upscaling math, with machine learning only being utilized for fluid motion frames (FMF) frame generation.
With FSR 4, AMD is moving to a complete ML-based pipeline. This starts from training the game models on Instinct GPUs to making use of dedicated FP8 units on the new RDNA 4 cards for the final render together with frame generation and Radeon Anti-Lag.
FSR 4 is RDNA 4-exclusive for now
Nvidia transitioned to a transformer model with DLSS 4 with arguably better visuals than the conventional neural network (CNN) used by earlier versions. AMD is pulling off something similar with FSR 4 as well.
AMD tells us that FSR 4 utilizes FP8 capabilities of RDNA 4's 2nd gen AI accelerators, which means older Radeon cards won't be reaping the benefits, at least for now. While there could be a possibility of backporting FSR 4 or its subsets to older cards, it's best to overlook that for now.
DLSS 4, on the other hand, can be leveraged by RTX GPUs as far as the Turing generation, although multi-frame generation is limited to RTX 50 series Blackwell cards alone.
FSR 4 uses a proprietary model that takes the best of CNN and transformer, according to the company.
Together with AFMF that gets updated to version 2.1, Anti-Lag 2, Radeon Boost, and Radeon Super Resolution — collectively referred to as Hypr-RX — FSR 4 promises to offer up to a 3.7x fps boost at 4K with ray tracing enabled. Essentially, Hypr-RX enables all aforementioned features for a game with a single click in the Adrenalin driver.
AMD promises FSR 4 support for 30 games at launch with 75+ games slated to receive support for the tech throughout 2025.
Adrenalin gets some AI assistance too
RDNA 4 cards will ship with Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 25.3.1 that offers a few nifty AI-powered features while largely retaining the familiar interface.
The latest Adrenalin offers Radeon Image Sharpening 2 that offers system-wide image sharpening without reliance on any third-party API. There's support for up to 8K 75 fps video codec acceleration and hardware flip metering, leveraging the changes to the media engine in RDNA 4.
AMD is also bundling a few utilities with Adrenalin 25.3.1 including AMD Chat, Image Inspector, and AI Apps Manager.
AMD Chat is the company's take on Chat RTX currently offered by Nvidia GPUs. It's basically an LLM that works locally, and you can chat with it to know all kinds of GPU-specific queries. You can also use AMD Chat for local image generation. Be prepared to spare 25 GB of disk space for this, however.
AI Apps Manager segregates AI-accelerated apps from the rest of your game library. AMD Image Inspector lets you capture rendering errors and report them directly to AMD. This is part of the AMD User Experience program, so it is fully opt-in. There might be a slight overhead to using it while gaming, but we will know once we get to test the feature ourselves.
AMD Chat and Image Inspector are add-in that can be customized via the new AMD Install Manager, which also helps with keeping your AMD chipset drivers up to date.
AMD's ROCm software stack is also slated to get some RDNA 4-tailored improvements, but they will be announced at a later date.
Source(s)
AMD Press Brief
