AMD’s FSR 4 gate is still locked for older Radeon cards, and nobody at Team Red will say why.
More than a year after FSR 4 landed with RDNA 4 and the Radeon RX 9000 series, AMD has stayed silent on bringing an INT8 build to RDNA 2 and RDNA 3. NVIDIA has kept newer DLSS versions running across older RTX generations, while AMD cannot even keep FSR 4 properly available on RDNA 3’s Radeon RX 7000.
AMD has been prodded endlessly about RDNA 2 and RDNA 3 support, especially since DLL files exist and nobody doubts INT8 compatibility.
The official line remains a loud-sounding nothing, which has left owners of RX 6000 and RX 7000 cards doing the usual, hacking around the silence.
That is where AMD’s former FSR head of development, Colin Riley, wandered into the frame. When asked why AMD will not talk about an INT8 FSR 4 build for RDNA 2 and RDNA 3, he answered with a meme: “I prefer not to speak. If I speak, I am in BIG trouble”.
It reads like someone knows the reason, knows it would look bad and knows the lawyers would rather he post a GIF than a sentence.
In the meantime, workarounds have been spreading because people want the new upscaler.
Third-party tools such as Optiscaler have been getting FSR 4 running on RX 6000 and RX 7000 cards, with users reporting that FSR 4.0 Balanced can beat FSR 3.1 Quality.
The claimed gains are sharper visuals, better clarity and noticeably less ghosting and shimmering.
FSR 4.0 can be more demanding than FSR 3.1, but the tinkerers say a few tweaks can claw back performance.
Reports say FSR 4.1 can be ported to RDNA 3 in a similar way, which makes AMD’s RX 9000-only stance look even more like a product-segmentation choice than a technical one.
