Owners of the best graphics cards made by AMD, rejoice — it seems that there could be a big performance boost coming your way. AMD has accidentally leaked the source code for its proprietary upscaling tech, FSR 4. The leak implies that FSR 4 might soon be available on older GPUs, too.
Right now, FSR 4 is only available on the latest RX 9000 series GPUs, so this could be huge. Here’s everything you need to know.
FSR 4 offers a significant performance boost (with some caveats)
Just last week, AMD accidentally published the entirety of the FSR 4 source code on GitHub. We can’t know whether this was intentional or not, but the code has since been taken down — but not before some outlets, such as VideoCardz, managed to take a peek. It appears that AMD was simply trying to publish the new FidelityFX SDK 2.0.
Without getting into the super-techy nitty-gritty, the leak revealed INT8 support in addition to FP8. This suggests that AMD might be exploring a version of FSR 4 that works on the RX 7000 series, including outstanding GPUs like the RX 7800 XT. The addition of INT8 would make it possible for FSR 4 to work on these older GPUs. AMD has previously said that it’d like to make FSR 4 more widely available, but it made no promises, so this is still a hopeful sign.
Leakers are aligned: AMD may be trying to make FSR 4 available on “less capable hardware.”
This would be great news for those who are using some of AMD’s older GPUs, of which there are many. The existing RDNA 4 lineup isn’t massive right now, and with the cards being sold above MSRP, many AMD enthusiasts are sticking to older GPUs for the time being. Meanwhile, FSR 4 has a lot to offer.
Outside of higher frame rates, FSR 4 has been found to reduce ghosting and improve image quality. It’s hard to compare it to Nvidia’s DLSS 4, as that frame generation tech is still more mature and functions differently, but FSR 4 is a huge leap in the right direction. Unfortunately, many gamers haven’t had the chance to try it, because AMD made an unprecedented move and chose to restrict it to RDNA 4.
AMD took a page out of Nvidia’s playbook
AMD FSR and Nvidia DLSS have been competing against each other for years now, but Nvidia has always had the upper hand. Of course, it’s all in the eye of the beholder — or in this case, the reviewer — but DLSS 3 and 4 have consistently produced a massive increase in frame rates. Artifacts and latency certainly happened (and still do happen), but in general, the tech was considered to be ahead of AMD.
DLSS also has the benefit of being widely available. Although AMD has several versions of FSR out all at once, the latest generations have suffered from slower adoption.
Despite these issues, AMD always had one big advantage — availability. FSR 1 through FSR 3 were available on all kinds of GPUs; they were completely platform-agnostic. You could use them on Nvidia, AMD, or Intel graphics cards, making them much more accessible to gamers. Even as an Nvidia user, I still used FSR 3 sometimes when it was available.
FSR 4 breaks the mold. It’s the most powerful iteration of this technology, but it’s also the first one to be locked to a single generation of graphics cards — RDNA 4. This move, while unprecedented for AMD, is nothing new to Nvidia. DLSS has always been unavailable outside of Nvidia’s RTX graphics cards, and both DLSS 3 and DLSS 4 are locked to a single generation, namely the RTX 40-series and the RTX 50-series.
If this new leak turns out to be reality, many gamers might suddenly gain access to AMD’s outstanding FSR 4 tech, once again giving AMD an upper hand over Nvidia when it comes to availability.
This could be massive, but there’s still another problem
If FSR 4 could suddenly become available to more AMD GPUs, everyone would win. However, there are still a few caveats to consider before we get too excited here.
First of all, we don’t know how much we can read into this leak. It does seem to be legitimate, but it’s hard to tell just how soon AMD might be planning to add that FSR 4 support to older GPUs. It could happen in a month, or it could happen in a year, or perhaps it’ll never happen — there’s no telling until AMD makes an official statement.
Second, even if FSR 4 becomes available, game-level adoption has been slow. Only around 65 titles currently support it. Compatibility is expanding, but rather slowly, so just having access to FSR 4 doesn’t guarantee that it’ll run in your favorite games. With that said, many AAA titles do support it now, including (as of very recently) Cyberpunk 2077. It’s still sad to see AMD having to play catch-up with Nvidia here, which offers broader adoption for DLSS 3 and 4 across many more games.
Despite the caveats, I certainly hope that FSR 4 makes its way to the RX 7000 lineup. Whether it’d also become available on older GPUs is doubtful, but the RX 7000 series is broad and was largely successful, so many gamers could benefit. Stay tuned — we’ll let you know if AMD makes FSR 4 officially available on older graphics cards.
