AMD FSR 3.1 announced, improves upscaling image quality and lets frame gen work with DLSS

AMD's FSR 3 with Frame Generation, the company's answer to NVIDIA DLSS 3, launched in September 2023. It is supported by just two games-Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum. A slow start, FSR 3 was also not quite as impressive as it should have been. Visual fidelity was a step down from DLSS 3, and features like support for VRR displays and tech like AMD's own FreeSync were missing.

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All that changed in December 2023 with AMD releasing the full source code and an updated, more impressive version of FSR 3 launching with Ubisoft's Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. With AMD improving frame issues and adding VRR support, 2024 saw an influx of games supporting FSR 3 (most recently with Starfield and The Last of Us Part I), bringing the total number of games with FSR 3 support to 40.

It's still far from where DLSS 3 is, but it's picking up pace - and FSR 3.1 was announced at GDC 2024. FSR 3.1 brings two significant updates: an improvement to upscaling image quality and the ability for FSR's frame generation technology to work with "other upscaling solutions" like NVIDIA's DLSS or Intel's XeSS.

This is excellent news for all PC gamers, from Radeon to GeForce RTX 30 Series owners. Due to advanced AI hardware, NVIDIA's DLSS 3 Frame Generation is limited to GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs, leaving GeForce RTX 30 Series gamers without an option to get in on the latest tech. With FSR 3's frame generation improving, pairing it with DLSS upscaling is very cool.

Decoupling FSR 3 upscaling and frame generation is a smart move as it opens access to more gamers, with AMD confirming that FSR 3 support is coming soon to Cyberpunk 2077, Dragon's Dogma 2, Dying Light 2 Stay Human, Frostpunk 2, Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut, NARAKA: BLADEPOINT, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2.

The biggest news might be the improvements to FSR 3's upscaling image quality, with temporal stability improvements and reduced ghosting compared to FSR 2.2. AMD's example of the update in the blog post includes GIF examples from Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart running at 1080p using AMD FSR 2.2/3.1 Performance mode with dramatic improvements. FSR has always struggled with resolutions lower than 4K, so it will be interesting to see the update in person, so stay tuned on that front.

FSR 3.2 also updates the AMD FidelityFX API to make it easier for developers to debug and make their implementation forward-compatible with newer versions of FSR. It also adds support for Vulkan and the Xbox Game Development Kit (GDK). The latter's mention probably means we'll start seeing FSR 3.1 support in Xbox titles sometime later this year.