AMD still has no plans to bring FSR 4 to RDNA 3 GPUs, and that's a shame

With the arrival of the Radeon RX 9000 Series of desktop graphics cards in 2025, AMD's RDNA 4-powered GPUs also launched with the company's new AI-powered FSR 4 rendering technology that has recently expanded to include Frame Generation and Ray Reconstruction as part of the company's FSR Redstone initiative.

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Requiring the more advanced FP8-capable AI hardware found in RDNA 4 GPUs, FSR 4 quickly became a highlight of the Radeon RX 9070 XT's launch, as the new and improved FSR Super Resolution finally caught up, or closed the gap, in image quality to NVIDIA's DLSS.

However, being exclusive to three desktop GPUs bucks the historical trend of AMD's FSR being open-source and platform agnostic, giving RDNA 3 gamers the sense that they've been left behind. Not only on desktops but also on AMD's gaming handhelds, which still run RDNA 3.5 Radeon technology, FSR 4 has yet to reach a platform where it could make the most significant impact.

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To make matters worse, when AMD released the updated FSR SDK last year with FSR 4, it accidentally included source code revealing that an INT-8 version of FSR 4 existed and was compatible with RDNA 3 GPUs such as the Radeon RX 7800 XT and 7900 XTX. And with that, enthusiasts started tinkering with FSR 4 and found it delivered exceptional results on older Radeon hardware, though it had a notable performance impact compared to FSR 3.

At CES 2026, we asked David McAfee, the Vice President and General Manager of Ryzen CPUs and Radeon graphics at AMD, if there were plans to bring FSR 4 to older Radeon GPUs, specifically the growing handheld market and devices like the upcoming Steam Machine. He notes that it was still a "very difficult technical challenge for us to solve," while hinting that we likely wouldn't see it anytime soon.

This week, a new video from Hardware Unboxed posed a similar question about the lack of FSR 4 for all Radeon gamers, adding that, with rising GPU costs, bringing FSR 4 support to RDNA 3 and older GPUs would breathe new life into older rigs. And make it so that someone with a Radeon RX 7800 XT wouldn't have to upgrade to an RDNA 4 GPU just to get the benefit of the "enormous image quality" improvement that FSR 4 brought. Before publishing the video, Hardware Unboxed asked about the prospect of FSR 4's INT-8 version receiving a proper release, and AMD responded with the classic "no updates to share at this time."

On the plus side, based on what we've been hearing and this new statement, it's not a flat-out "no." Still, there's a growing sense that the lack of FSR 4 for RDNA 3 and even RDNA 2 gamers is shaping up to be quite the oversight from AMD.