AMD FSR 4 support arrives in hundreds of games thanks to OptiScaler

With the introduction of its new Radeon RX 9000 Series of graphics cards, AMD also introduced its new AI-powered FSR 4 upscaler, exclusive to its new RDNA 4 GPUs. With its significant improvement in image quality compared to FSR 3, FSR 4 finally sees AMD catch up to NVIDIA DLSS as a viable alternative. The only problem is that FSR 4 support is limited, especially when compared to the hundreds of games that support DLSS.

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This is where the third-party, open-source OptiScaler comes in, an innovative tool that "intercepts upscaler calls from the game," allowing you to redirect them to your preferred upscaler. For GeForce RTX gamers, it offers them the ability to replace Intel's XeSS, AMD's FSR, or older versions of DLSS with the latest DLSS 4 technology. For Radeon gamers, it allows you to swap out DLSS with FSR, covering both Super Resolution and Frame Generation.

As part of OptiScaler's latest update, the tool now supports FSR 4 for Radeon RX 9000 Series owners. Yes, this means that you can enable FSR 4 in hundreds of DirectX 11 and 12 titles with DLSS, dramatically expanding FSR 4's reach.

There are some caveats: the Vulkan API is not supported, and it won't work with games that feature anti-cheat technology. Additionally, there's no guarantee that issues won't arise when replacing DLSS or FSR 2 with FSR 4. The process involves copying FSR 4's files and installing OptiScaler for each game you plan to use it with, along with following specific steps to ensure the replacement occurs as intended.

It's not a simple one-click solution; however, it does allow Radeon RX 9070 XT owners to use FSR 4 in a wide range of popular PC games. AMD utilizes an FSR DLL replacement process to enable FSR 4 in FSR 3.1 games at the driver level. The reason it doesn't do the same for FSR 1 or FSR 2 games is that it only switched to the DLL model with FSR 3.1. It will be interesting to see if AMD releases a similar driver-based approach for bringing FSR 4 to more games. This is unlikely, as it would essentially mean replacing or overriding DLSS files with FSR files.