AMD has dumped RX 6000 and RX 7000 owners on the naughty step. If you are running an RDNA 2 or RDNA 3 card, FSR 4 and FSR 4.1 are not intended for you, at least according to the official support list.
The latest upscaler brings real gains in image stability, reconstruction and performance scaling, but it is walled off behind newer hardware in a way that feels needlessly tight.
RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 users have been left watching RDNA 4 get the love, while AMD quietly waves them towards an upgrade. It has tied FSR 4 to the RX 9000 series and its FP8-friendly design, as if everything else is hopeless.
That is where the irritation kicks in, because RDNA 2 and RDNA 3’s INT8 setup is not some useless museum piece. It looks more like it is being fenced out by decisions that smell of marketing rather than hard limits.
Nvidia has not drawn the same hard line with DLSS 4.5 on RTX 20 and 30-series cards. Frame generation stays locked to Ada Lovelace and Blackwell, but the core upscaler still shows up for older kit.
AMD has taken the opposite approach, locking the base upscaler behind the newer architecture, leaving older Radeon owners refreshing patch notes for support that never lands. Even the RX 9070 XT board partner glamour shots, like ASRock’s Steel Legend, read like a not-so-subtle hint.
FSR 4 marks a significant shift in how AMD handles upscaling, leaning more heavily on AI-driven reconstruction and data formats like FP8, with INT8 appearing in certain builds. The results are cleaner edges, steadier motion and performance presets that finally stop looking like someone smeared Vaseline on the screen.
None of that matters if you are on RDNA 2 or RDNA 3, because AMD insists those GPUs lack the AI blocks to run it as intended. Unofficially, things are murkier, and that is where tools like OptiScaler turn the whole situation into a bit of an embarrassment.
