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It may have taken several years, but AMD has finally joined Nvidia in the AI resolution upscaling club with FSR 4, and I had a chance to play with the new tech on a new AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT graphics card at CES. The company had two machines set up for a side-by-side comparison, one with FSR 3 and one with AMD FSR 4, and the difference is instantly noticeable.
Of course, the bar was already low here. AMD might be able to say its FSR tech works on any GPU, but Nvidia DLSS has always had the upper hand when it comes to image quality. Now, however, it looks as though AMD has finally nailed the formula with FSR 4, at least from our time with it at CES. There are some caveats, though, one of which is that the tech currently only works on the company’s new GPUs, such as the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT.
This is also an early comparison based on pre-release hardware and software, and AMD had deliberately locked the two test systems at 60Hz, so we’re unable to gauge the performance of the new GPUs. What we can see, though, is the improved image quality of FSR 4 compared to FSR 3, thanks to an FSR 4-enabled version of Ratchet and Clank that AMD had running on the new rigs.
The difference in quality is substantial, and you can see it everywhere in the scene when it’s moving, with much less in the way of shimmering and noise around edges, and a much sharper image. Areas where the benefits of FSR 4 are particularly noticeable are where Ratchet’s fur meets the rest of the scene. As you can see in the image above, the edges around Ratchet’s tail look much sharper when it swishes, as do the edges around the ears. Even the shadows look significantly better on FSR 4 (right) than FSR 3 (left), with clear edges that aren’t surrounded by noise.
This is all good, of course, but it’s taken AMD a long time to get to this point. Nvidia first introduced AI-based DLSS back in 2018, and while it didn’t get off to a great start at first, Nvidia has had a good-looking version of DLSS upscaling for a number of years now, and it’s now improved it further with DLSS 4 and multi frame gen. AMD will also need to persuade developers to implement this feature in games.
It’s also worth noting that this AMD FSR 4 demo only shows upscaling, and not frame generation, and we also have no indication of the frame rates. Ratchet & Clank was running smoothly on this test system, but it’s not a particularly demanding game.
Where does AMD go from here? The company is known for opening up its standards, compared to Nvidia’s closed ecosystems, so it would be interesting to see if AMD allows this new tech to work on Nvidia Tensor cores in the future. There’s also currently no word on whether a version of the tech could work on the matrix cores in AMD’s Radeon RX 7000-series GPUs.
Still, it’s good to see AMD finally catching up here. If the company can also fix its ray tracing performance, and price its new GPUs seriously competitively, then it may just be in with a chance. In the meantime, check out our guide to the best graphics card if you’re looking to buy a new gaming GPU right now.
