AMD's FSR 3 and FSR 4 are now both called FSR Upscaling, but there's a catch

AMD drops the numerical branding for the simpler FSR Upscaling, but only the latest RDNA 4 GPUs will have access to the superior FSR Upscaling (ML).

AMD's FSR 3 and FSR 4 are now both called FSR Upscaling, but there's a catch
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TL;DR: AMD officially launched its new FSR 'Redstone' AI-powered upscaling technologies, simplifying the Super Resolution branding to FSR Upscaling. However, the advanced ML version is exclusive to RDNA 4 GPUs, while older RDNA generations use the less effective Analytical version, highlighting a significant image quality gap across Radeon GPU generations.

AMD lifted the lid and officially launched its new suite of AMD FSR 'Redstone' technologies today, and with that, it has decided to simplify the naming. FSR originally stood for FidelityFX Super Resolution, an upscaling technology created in response to NVIDIA's AI-powered DLSS Super Resolution. With FSR 'Redstone' introducing new AI-powered technologies and features, AMD FSR now refers to all FSR technologies - past, present, and future.

AMD's FSR 3 and FSR 4 are now both called FSR Upscaling, but there's a catch 2
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And when it comes to Super Resolution, FSR 3 and FSR 4 now fall under the same branding - FSR Upscaling. Simple. Well, not exactly, as the new AI-powered FSR 'Redstone' technologies are exclusive to the latest RDNA 4 generation of GPUs - the Radeon RX 9060 XT, RX 9070, and flagship RX 9070 XT. This means there are two versions of FSR Upscaling: the newer RDNA 4-exclusive FSR Upscaling (ML) and the older FSR Upscaling (Analytical).

It's a change that, on paper, makes sense because AMD's Adrenalin drivers and software, or a game with native FSR support, will automatically choose the version depending on the Radeon GPU you have. In a way, it's reminiscent of how NVIDIA has handled its new upgraded Transformer model for DLSS Super Resolution, except the Transformer and older CNN model work across all GeForce RTX graphics cards.

And this is the potential problem with simplifying the naming to FSR Upscaling, as there's a vast gulf separating the two when it comes to image quality. RDNA 1, RDNA 2, and RDNA 3 owners are limited to using FSR Upscaling (Analytical), the non-AI version that is essentially FSR 3.1.

AMD's FSR 3 and FSR 4 are now both called FSR Upscaling, but there's a catch 3
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The issue here is that this older version struggles at lower resolutions, which AMD is aware of, as it demonstrated this during its FSR 'Redstone' pre-brief. As you can see in the image above, FSR Upscaling (Analytical) looks considerably worse than FSR Upscaling (ML) at 1080p in Mafia: The Old Country. Compared to the native 1080p image, the loss in image fidelity means you'd probably look for an alternative solution to improving performance. With FSR Upscaling (ML), the image fidelity is impressive. Although not on par with native, as it's upscaling from 540p, you've got a viable trade-off to boost performance and latency.

It's now the same situation with FSR Frame Generation: the new and improved FSR Frame Generation (ML) is exclusive to RDNA 4, while the older FSR Frame Generation (Analytical) is for older GPUs like the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 6800 XT. Unfortunately, it does look like FSR 'Redstone' technologies won't be making their way to previous generations of Radeon GPUs, even though leaked source code for FSR 4 included a legacy 'INT 8' version of FSR Upscaling (ML) that worked on RDNA 3 and RDNA 2 GPUs.