- Nvidia’s DLSS 4 has set the bar for AMD’s FSR 4, with its new transformer model
- The first looks at FSR 4 in performance mode are very promising
- Team Red may struggle to compete if the entire package of FSR 4 is exclusive to RDNA 4
Nvidia has impressed me with its new DLSS 4 transformer model, which provides great image quality and stability even at super-resolution ‘performance’ modes – and now, I’m really hoping that AMD can keep up with FSR 4.
Based on my previous coverage regarding DLSS 4’s enhancements across several games, Team Red definitely has a big task ahead at potentially competing with Nvidia in this space. At the time of writing, FSR 4 is only confirmed to be available on RDNA 4 GPUs (no news yet on whether it can be used on RDNA 3 GPUs), so it may already be at a disadvantage up against DLSS 4 in terms of its capability of catering to older GPUs, since Nvidia’s new upscaling tech will be compatible with GPUs way back to the RTX 2000 series.
Taking DLSS 4’s jump from CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) to the new, superior transformer model into consideration, games will benefit from this, particularly in cases of poor optimization – while this shouldn’t give game developers an excuse to slack off in the optimization department, it’s hard to deny how important it will be going forward.
Demo footage of AMD’s FSR 4 is already out in the wild from CES 2025, and a prime example of this is the Hardware Unboxed FSR 3.1 and FSR 4 comparison video on YouTube (available below). In the same manner that Nvidia’s DLSS 4 impressed me with its improved visual clarity with DLSS 4 in performance mode, FSR 4 appears to follow in those same footsteps – now there’s no frame rate counter, so it’s difficult to judge just how good this mode will be performance wise, but it’s certainly a good sign.
If AMD’s FSR 4 comes close to Nvidia’s DLSS 4, what does this mean in terms of competition?
In the event that FSR 4 goes toe-to-toe with DLSS 4, the only aspect that would then be holding Team Red back from competing would be the possible exclusivity to RDNA 4. While that could come down to hardware limitations preventing it from working on older GPUs, I’ve once held the same frustrations with Nvidia before regarding DLSS 3’s Frame Generation being exclusive to RTX 4000 series GPUs – so the same case applies here.
In this case, it would be an even bigger omission – we’re not just talking about FSR 4’s frame gen potentially being exclusive to RDNA 4, but the entire package that includes its super-resolution technology too.
As much as I absolutely want AMD to provide the necessary competition against Team Green in the GPU market, it already stated that the focus will be on mid-range GPUs (which we’re yet to really determine with the RX 9000 series), and DLSS 4 will be available on all RTX GPUs – if we’re being honest, it won’t help AMD’s position in this race…
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