How to Make Games Look Great with AMD FSR

If you want your games to look good, you might think your only option is to upgrade your PC. However, there are software solutions that can get the job done, and this free AMD tool might be just what you're looking for.

What is AMD FSR?

AMD FSR or FidelityFX Super Resolution uses framerate upscaling and framerate generation to help increase FPS in games while maintaining or even improving graphics quality. You can enable this feature in the graphics settings of games that support it.

FSR is AMD's answer to Nvidia DLSS. However, while both technologies upscale games and help increase FPS, they work very differently.

Both FSR and DLSS render the game at a lower native resolution to make it easier for the PC to run, then upscale it before it reaches the display for higher fidelity. For FPS boosting, they automatically detect when the game is skipping frames and use image interpolation algorithms to fill in the gaps. This results in a significant increase in performance and image quality at the cost of a little GPU space.

AMD's FSR uses spatial upscaling algorithms to take lower-resolution graphics and upscale them to make them more visually appealing. The technology is also open source, meaning it's easier to integrate into games and runs on more GPUs, unlike DLSS.

FSR has gone through 4 generations since its release in 2021. Depending on which version of FSR you are using (1, 2, 3 or 3.1), the end result will be different. Frame generation is also a fairly new concept to FSR, having only recently been released as FSR 3. AMD introduced FSR 4 with a lot of AI features.

So how does FSR deliver a performance boost? According to AMD, you can combine upscaling and framerate generation to get up to 3.3x higher frame rates on Radeon RX 7000 series GPUs when gaming at 4K or 1440p resolution.

Games like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Ghost of Tsushima Director's Cut, and The Last of Us Part I deliver 3x the FPS you can get at max graphics settings with the combination of FSR and a Radeon RX 7000 series GPU.

Actual performance will vary depending on your PC configuration, especially your GPU. However, you can still expect significant performance gains when using FSR's upscaling and image creation capabilities.

Which GPUs does this technology work on?

Since FSR is open source, it works on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs – unlike DLSS, which is exclusive to Nvidia hardware. Here's a quick chart showing the supported and recommended graphics hardware for FSR 3 and 2.

Additionally, while FSR 3 and 2 are optimized to work with dedicated graphics cards, they can still be used with some Ryzen processors that come with AMD's integrated Radeon graphics.

How to use AMD FSR to upgrade games

Using FSR is simply a matter of enabling the setting in whatever game you're playing. Keep in mind that the game needs to support FSR for you to use this tool, so it won't be available in every game.

Luckily, the list of supported games is quite long, with over 100 games supported on FSR versions. You can check out the FSR supported games page on AMD's website for details. New games are constantly being added to the list, so there's a good chance the game you want to play will be supported.

In cases where a game doesn't support AMD FSR, you can still use something called Radeon Super Resolution or RSR to upscale almost any game you want. This technology is based on FSR 1 and can work in any full-screen proprietary game without the game developer having to add any additional software support. The only downside is that you need at least an AMD 5000 series GPU to run it, as this feature is part of AMD graphics drivers and can only run on AMD GPUs.

FSR won't magically make every game better, however, as the PC hardware still has to do all the heavy lifting. When I tried playing Hellblade 2, my test laptop struggled to get past 20FPS even with the graphics settings turned down to the lowest possible setting and FSR running at full throttle.

Different games also react differently to FSR's intervention, meaning your performance will vary. For example, while Forza Horizon 5 and Warframe run well above 60 FPS with respectable graphics, Warzone and Ghost of Tsushima are a bit too much, with random bugs popping up.

Marvin Fry

Update 22 December 2024