AMD FSR 4.1 has been a massive improvement for Team Red's AI upscaling tech, but it was previously only available on Radeon 7000 and 9000 graphics cards. But today, AMD has announced that the technology will now be coming to more devices like the Xbox Series X.
Just like DLSS, FSR 4.1 uses AI to take a lower resolution input image and upscale it back up to native resolution, but because it's more computationally expensive than FSR 3, support for lower-powered hardware has been slow. However, thanks to the ongoing partnership with Sony (dubbed Project Amethyst), AMD has been making huge strides to make it run better on weaker devices.
AMD announced the widened support in a video, and will bring the upscaling tech to RDNA 2 graphics cards like the 6800 XT, along with Z2-powered handhelds like the Xbox Ally X20. What stopped AMD from bringing this model to these older and less-powerful chips was that it was harder to run, which eliminated some of the benefit of even using upscaling. But, according to AMD SVP of Gaming and Graphics Jack Huynh, AMD was able to trim down the model to make it efficient on less powerful hardware that might not have the same suite of AI accelerators that RDNA 4 graphics cards do.
This comes just a couple weeks after AMD and Sony did the same exact thing with PSSR 2, trimming it down to a new model, dubbed QSSR, for the base PS5. QSSR does offer much better upscaling than FSR 2-based solution the PS5 had before, so I can only imagine this slimmer FSR 4.1 will have a similar effect for the Xbox Ally X.
But more importantly, this update will also allow FSR 4.1 to come to the Xbox Series X for the first time. The new upscaling model isn't out yet on Xbox, but AMD says it is 'coming soon,' although it's not clear what 'soon' means there. Hopefully, Microsoft is able to get it into a patch before Grand Theft Auto 6 launches next month.
After all, there have been plenty of concerns that Rockstar's next crime epic is going to be extremely hard to run for the base consoles, and a better upscaler just means better performance and improved image quality. But even if this FSR 4.1 update misses GTA's launch date, Xbox is going to continue working with AMD to bring upscaling to its consoles.
In the same video Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet confirmed that AMD's next-generation FSR 'Diamond' would be coming to Project Helix. And now that Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has confirmed that Helix would be a whole 'family of devices,' I hope that this fancy new upscaling finds its way to all of them, no matter how powerful they are.