When AMD announced and launched FSR 4, its AI-powered upgrade to its open-source, platform-agnostic FSR technology, it deservedly received a lot of praise for finally bridging the image-quality gap between FSR and NVIDIA DLSS. However, there was also some backlash as FSR 4 was and still is exclusive to AMD’s latest RDNA 4 architecture and Radeon RX 9000 Series of desktop graphics cards.
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The reason is simple: the AI model FSR 4 requires specific AI hardware and technology available only in the latest Radeon cards. However, with AMD inadvertently leaking FSR 4’s source code, several community members noticed that a version of the technology, dubbed FSR4 INT8, was in development that worked with RDNA 3 and RDNA 2 GPUs – covering the Radeon RX 7000 and RX 6000 Series.
And with that, the community project OptiScaler, a Super Resolution and Frame Generation replacement tool for FSR, DLSS, and XeSS, has done what many have been asking AMD to do for almost a year now: bring FSR 4 to all Radeon gamers. And the latest OptiScaler release presents a major milestone for RDNA 2 gamers with cards like the Radeon RX 6700 XT or 6800 XT. The FSR 4 injection or override now works on RDNA 2 GPUs with current Radeon drivers while also improving image quality by dramatically reducing ghosting.
Now, it’s worth mentioning that the Optiscaler community is updating the unreleased, unfinished FSR4 INT8 version that leaked; this is not the same version of the technology available to RDNA 4 gamers, which was recently updated to FSR 4.1. In a way, this makes the community effort even more impressive, as the team has managed to improve this version of FSR 4, which it’s calling FSR 4.0.2b, to fix the ghosting issues that RDNA 2 gamers were previously experiencing with this workaround.
The fact that it’s possible to get FSR 4 working not only on older Radeon RX graphics cards but also on GeForce RTX cards makes AMD’s silence on expanding FSR 4’s reach all the more concerning. With dramatically improved image quality compared to FSR 2 and FSR 3, like DLSS, it can be viewed as a free performance uplift – breathing new life into older hardware.