AMD has announced an upgraded version of its FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technology at this week's Game Developers Conference. The company first launched FSR in 2021, then announced version 2 in 2022, and version 3 arrived in late 2023. Now, it's adding new features and capabilities with FSR 3.1. AMD says it will be available to developers in Q2 and arriving in games later this year.
AMD says version 3.1 improves its upscaling technology, including less "shimmering" around objects at rest or in motion, ghosting reductions, and increased detail preservation. In addition to these visual quality upgrades, AMD is taking the massive step of decoupling FSR from its Fluid Motion Frames (FMF) technology. This move will allow gamers to use DLSS from Nvidia or XeSS from Intel and still use AMD's frame generation technology as it's supported on non-AMD GPUs. This is a big deal for owners of older Nvidia GPUs since frame-gen is only supported by its 40-series cards. AMD says the first game to receive FSR 3.1 will be Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, with that update arriving later this year.
FSR 3.1 seems pretty early in development, as AMD is just showing it off on Ratchet and Clank for now. However, support for FSR 3 does seem to be increasing. It famously launched FSR 3 last year with just two games—Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum—but says 40 games now support it as of March 20. AMD says 20 more games are in the pipeline to support it soon, including popular games like Cyberpunk 2077, Dying Light 2 Stay Human, and Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut. AMD's blog post doesn't state if all games that support version 3 will also support 3.1 at some point, but we assume that's the case. (Update 1:43 p.m.: AMD says version 3 and 3.1 are separate, so developers can choose to implement either one.)
This might be the final update to version 3 of AMD's upscaling technology before it follows in the footsteps of Nvidia and Intel and moves to a hardware-based solution. Earlier this month, AMD's CTO was recently asked about the company's focus in 2024, and he responded by saying, "We are enabling our gaming devices to upscale using AI, and 2024 is really a huge deployment year for us." It's been rumored that those "gaming devices" he is referring to could be next-gen consoles, but the technology should crossover to PC as well, so an AI-powered FSR 4 could arrive alongside RDNA 4 GPUs later this year.
Microsoft is also working on adding a hardware-agnostic upscaling API for Windows called DirectX Super Resolution, which the company is talking about more at this week's conference. However, we've yet to see a side-by-side comparison with FSR, DLSS, and XeSS, so it remains to be seen if it will offer superior performance and fidelity over solutions from GPU companies.
