Luke James Social Links Navigation Contributor Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist. Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory.
usertests Just get FSR4 upscaling to work on RDNA3. That's all anybody wants. Reply
Notton Could AMD offer a beta or prototype Redstone build for RDNA 3? Not right now, according to Zdravkovic — such a release is “currently not in the plan,” but he did thank PC World “for the hint” and expressed interest in thinking through how such a prototype might work. AMD also emphasized that it continues to improve older architectures where it makes sense. Zdravkovic said the company is “definitely not going to withhold anything that really makes a difference,” but only when the net result is a clear improvement to gameplay quality or responsiveness. I guess we'll see if Valve and Xbox can wrangle AMD to officially support Redstone on their hardware. Reply
palladin9479 Yeah this is totally about artificial product segmentation. FSR4 takes advantage of specialized hardware instructions that RDNA4 has, and while it could be made to work with RDNA3 what would be the economic benefit to AMD to do so? If anything it would lower demand for RDNA4 cards as it would be one less reason to convince people to upgrade. Reply
thestryker As much as nvidia does the same stuff they haven't blocked DLSS upscaling even when it will give poor performance (4.5 quality on 20/30 series is slower than native). Upscaling has definitely become a quality of life thing as resolutions and detail have increased along with the prevalence of TAA making native not necessarily looking great. As long as the feature does work it should be enabled for older cards even if it doesn't work as well. Reply
mitch074 palladin9479 said: Yeah this is totally about artificial product segmentation. FSR4 takes advantage of specialized hardware instructions that RDNA4 has, and while it could be made to work with RDNA3 what would be the economic benefit to AMD to do so? If anything it would lower demand for RDNA4 cards as it would be one less reason to convince people to upgrade. It's not artificial – reading the RDNA 1, 2, 3 and 4 spec sheets do show that several instructions really used by Redstone were added with RDNA4. Proper emulation can be done somewhat with RDNA3, but RDNA2 does need a much degraded emulation to actually work. AMD's code dump showed it, and the results were not universally good – they tried, it didn't really work. Community picked it up and ran with it, AMD aren't discouraging it… Of course I'd be happier with official support, but let's consider the alternatives. Reply
Notton Yeah, RDNA3 does not have, if I remember correctly, FP8 or Sparsity, which is what FSR4 runs on. The RDNA3/INT8 version of FSR4 runs 9~15% slower than FSR3.x, but looks immensely better. 15% performance loss for immensely better image quality is fine, but AMD didn't think so. Reply
palladin9479 Notton said: Yeah, RDNA3 does not have, if I remember correctly, FP8 or Sparsity, which is what FSR4 runs on. The RDNA3/INT8 version of FSR4 runs 9~15% slower than FSR3.x, but looks immensely better. 15% performance loss for immensely better image quality is fine, but AMD didn't think so. FP8 instructions are missing so you have to emulate them with INT8 instead, thus the 10~15% performance penalty. AMD doesn't want to support that because there is no economic benefit to doing so. You can get it by just pasting some DLL's so it's not exactly hard, though those DLL's are based on an older code version so future performance enhancements would be missing. I suspect AMD will eventually opensource the FSR library code eventually and just let people build custom libraries from it. Reply
-Fran- AMD really needs to take a stance on this. This non-commital attitude is getting annoying. FSR going Open Source may help here, but not expecting a quick turnaround. Regards. Reply
cknobman palladin9479 said: AMD doesn't want to support that because there is no economic benefit to doing so. Every single brand new handheld gaming chip they sell is missing FSR4 support. And every upcoming Steam machine for the living room is missing it. You dont think there is a economic benefit to adding support for potentially millions of brand new devices consumers might want to buy? I thin AMD is making a huge mistake here. It would be quite such a huge deal if FSR 3 was pretty good, but its not. Reply
mitch074 cknobman said: Every single brand new handheld gaming chip they sell is missing FSR4 support. And every upcoming Steam machine for the living room is missing it. You dont think there is a economic benefit to adding support for potentially millions of brand new devices consumers might want to buy? I thin AMD is making a huge mistake here. It would be quite such a huge deal if FSR 3 was pretty good, but its not. Actually, they really only elminiated it from RDNA1 and 2 – 3 is still open. Current code indicates that it's generally 10-15% slower than FSR4 and looks almost the same, but it does cause artifacts in a few games still. In short, if they mainlined it now, they'd get incendiary headlines : "AMD cheating with FSR4, lowers quality on RDNA3 to keep FPS up". If they hid it a away in a 'experimental/beta' driver tab, they'd get "AMD hide away performance feature in older gen to sell more RDNA4". Looks like they're considering something like the latter, though, which would be quite nice. Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/amd-leaves-the-door-open-to-experimenta-fsr-redstone-support-on-rdna3#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.