I’ve been very critical of AMD’s FSR 3 in the past. It’s not that the tool is bad — in fact, I think it’s excellent — but for a long time, it just wasn’t available in a wide swath of games. That’s changing. Over the past year, AMD has broadened support for its upscaling and frame generation tech massively, and it’s continued to refine the upscaling algorithm that makes up the core of FSR. I’m sure you, like myself, have settled into assumptions about what FSR is capable of and where it’s available, but as we close out the year, it’s high time to challenge those assumptions.
It’s no secret that Nvidia’s DLSS 3 is a core component of some of the best graphics cards you can buy, and AMD’s FSR 3.1, although impressive, doesn’t reach the heights of Nvidia’s AI-driven tech. That hasn’t changed, and I’m not sure it ever will. But based on the FSR 3.1 implementations I’m seeing today, AMD is offering a tool that useful in a ton of situations.
What changed?
Let’s back up to a little over a year ago. AMD first released FSR 3 in September of last year, and only in two games: Immortals of Aveum and Forspoken. Both games were received critically and commercially with a collective sigh, and by the time FSR 3 was added, the wider opinion about these titles had already been set in stone. Based on player numbers at the time FSR 3 was added, the only reason to boot up these games was to check out FSR 3, not to actually play them.
Over the past year, there have been two major changes with FSR. First, AMD released FSR 3.1. It was announced in March at GDC 2024, but it didn’t release until June of this year alongside the PC release of Horizon Forbidden West. It launched in a slate of six PlayStation releases that had been ported to PC. The release was much better for support than the original FSR 3, but considering the quality boost AMD was claiming, support was slow out of the gate.
It’s kind of remarkable what’s happened over the past six months, however. Using the list on the PCGamingWiki, I counted 55 games that support FSR 3.1 now. They aren’t all barn burners, of course, but there are a lot of high-profile games with the feature, many of which included it on day one. That list includes Silent Hill 2, Marvel Rivals, Stalker 2, Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2, and Final Fantasy XVI. And that’s just to name a few.
Moreover, that list of 55 games is just those with FSR 3.1. If you’re more concerned about frame generation support overall — both FSR 3 and 3.1 support frame generation, but the upscaling looks better with 3.1 — the list is even larger. AMD’s official list includes 76 titles with FSR 3 support. To put that into context — in February of this year, when I heavily criticized FSR 3 for lacking support, it was only available in 12 games, many of which weren’t very popular. Today, most major PC releases arrive with FSR 3.1 or FSR 3 support on day one.
I’ll cover quality differences between FSR and DLSS next — and believe me, there are plenty of differences — but broad support is one of the major reasons DLSS 3 has been so attractive this past year. The scales are starting to balance, though. By my count, there are 133 games with DLSS 3 support. Give or take a few titles with both DLSS and FSR support, the two tools are much closer in support today than they were even six months ago.
A closer look
The support for FSR has improved massively, but so has the quality. I won’t pretend that AMD has caught up to DLSS. It hasn’t. But the quality comparison of DLSS to FSR sometimes loses context, particularly when you’re zoomed in on fine details that may not make a huge difference in the heat of the moment.
Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 sets the tone for this conversation. Above, you can see the Performance mode of DLSS 3, FSR 3.1, and TAA outputting to 4K. It’s pretty clear that DLSS looks the best. It’s sharper, and it doesn’t struggle with instability on details like the barbed wire in front of the fire. FSR 3.1 does. However, looking at TAA is a sobering reminder of the state of upscaling just a couple of years ago. It looks horrible. DLSS looks the best, no doubt, but I think it’s worth highlighting how far AMD has come with FSR.
Since the release of FSR 3, many games have added AMD’s Native AA mode, too. This is similar to Nvidia DLAA, which is much better than the TAA implementation in most games. It’s basically DLSS, just running at native resolution. AMD’s take on Native AA is very good as well. I’d go as far as to say it’s just as good as DLAA, and sometimes even a little better. You can see in that in action in Ghost of Tsushima below.
The differences are much more minor with any sort of native anti-aliasing mode, but DLAA and FSR Native AA definitely look better than TAA. You can see that clearly if you look at the yellow trees in the background. Between FSR and DLAA, the leaves are slightly sharper with FSR Native AA than DLAA, but that’s really splitting hairs. The big deal here is being able to use something like FSR’s Native AA with any graphics card, particularly if you combine it with FSR 3 frame generation.
The conversation could stop there, and for most part, it does. DLSS looks better than FSR, but FSR works with any GPU. But I actually found some games where FSR looks a bit better. Marvel Rivals is a prime example of that. Once again in Performance mode, you can see how the TAA upscaling struggles to stabilize shadows with the game’s cel-shaded styling. What’s interesting is that DLSS shows some of that instability as well, while FSR locks the shadows in place.
That’s not what I’d expect. I usually expect FSR to work like it does in Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. FSR 3.1 is certainly sharper than the game’s built-in IGTI upscaling, basically matching the quality of DLSS. However, it’s not stable. You can see these random white dots on the grates close to the camera, as well as some instability around the edges of the wrench. That’s how I’ve come to know FSR, but Marvel Rivals challenges that assumption.
Rather than a strict quality gap, something else became apparent during my time with several games packing FSR 3.1. DLSS is more consistent, but that doesn’t mean it’s strictly better in every game. There are games like Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 where DLSS is clearly better, but there are also titles like Marvel Rivals where I wouldn’t claim one tool is better than the other. The implementation makes a significant difference. DLSS has many more consistently high-quality implementations, but that doesn’t mean you should count out FSR.
The only area where it really struggles is in scenes like the one you can see from Ghost of Tsushima above. Moving, highly detailed, and dense objects aren’t recreated as accurately with FSR as they are with DLSS. Still, AMD has come a long way since the first versions of FSR, and in some games, the differences between FSR 3.1 and DLSS are fairly small in the grand scheme of gameplay.
Turning the corner
It took more than a year, but AMD has reached a level of quality that’s good enough and a density of games that’s high enough for FSR 3 to be a very compelling tool. I don’t want to silo this topic to a competition between FSR 3 and DLSS 3, however. Although both tools accomplish the same goal, they’re focused on different use cases. The better and broader FSR 3 is, the more the use cases for it are actually valid, and that’s something to get excited about.
Unlike DLSS 3, FSR 3 isn’t a tool designed and built around selling you a new graphics card. That’s largely been Nvidia’s approach, and that’s not a bad thing. It bills DLSS 3 as enabling this premium tier of gaming experience that otherwise wouldn’t be possible — I’m thinking along the lines of Alan Wake 2 or the recent Indiana Jones and the Great Circle with path tracing. You can use it to bring weaker hardware up to par, but Nvidia’s focus is enabling the next wave of visual fidelity.
FSR 3’s focus is more on bringing that lower-end hardware up to par, even if it can enable those next-gen experiences as well. That use case is very compelling, and it’s a reason to root for FSR 3’s success regardless of which GPU brand you prefer.
I just encountered this recently. I’ve been playing Silent Hill 2, and I thought I’d have to put it on hold on a recent trip I made to New York. I bring along an Asus Zenbook S 16 when I travel, which isn’t powerful enough to play most games, let alone something like Silent Hill 2. With FSR 3, though, I was able to play a bit of the game on my trip. This laptop has a recent Ryzen AI 300 processor, but that’s beside the point. I can use FSR 3 on just about any modern hardware, so even if I happened to have something like Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i with a recent Intel chip, it would still work.
Was it the ideal way to play Silent Hill 2? Hell no. Would I prefer to play it with my RTX 4090 desktop? Every day of the week. But I was able to keep playing during my downtime, and I wouldn’t have been able to without FSR 3. These are the situations where broad FSR 3 adoption and better quality make all of the difference. It’s not just this specific use case, either. We’ve already seen what FSR 3 can do on handhelds in games such as Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth.
Now, with broader support and better image quality, those use cases are actually practical. I highly doubt there will be a day that FSR can match what DLSS is capable of, at least if AMD continues with its approach to broad hardware support. It doesn’t need to match DLSS to be useful, though. It’s just good enough in most games to be a viable alternative when DLSS isn’t an option.
Hopefully, the story doesn’t stop here. FSR 3 has come a long way from where it was when it showed up in Immortals of Aveum and Forspoken a little over a year ago, and hopefully, we can look back in a year from now and see that same level of progress.
