Enlarge (credit: AMD)

Last summer, AMD debuted the latest version of its FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technology . While version 2.x focused mostly on making lower-resolution images look better at higher resolutions, version 3.0 focused on AMD's "Fluid Motion Frames," which attempt to boost FPS by generating interpolated frames to insert between the ones that your GPU is actually rendering.

Today, the company is announcing FSR 3.1 , which among other improvements decouples the upscaling improvements in FSR 3.x from the Fluid Motion Frames feature. FSR 3.1 will be available "later this year" in games whose developers choose to implement it.

Fluid Motion Frames and Nvidia's equivalent DLSS Frame Generation usually work best when a game is already running at a high frame rate, and even then can be more prone to mistakes and odd visual artifacts than regular FSR or DLSS upscaling. FSR 3.0 was an all-or-nothing proposition, but version 3.1 should let you pick and choose what features you want to enable.

Enlarge / Midrange GPUs like AMD's Radeon RX 7600 or Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 can benefit a lot from DLSS and FSR upscaling, which can improve image quality and framerates beyond what the hardware can render natively. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

One of the most interesting developments in 3D gaming in the last half-decade or so is the advent of advanced upscaling technologies—features like Nvidia's Deep-Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), and Intel's Xe Super Sampling (XeSS). These technologies all aim to provide better, sharper image quality when playing at non-native resolutions, and when they're working well, they can boost frame rates and help squeeze a bit more life out of an older or lower-end GPU.

The problem has been that game developers need to actually support these technologies in their games, and it's incumbent on developers to support each individual upscaling technology. DLSS usually looks a bit better than FSR, but it requires an Nvidia GPU; FSR works on just about anything but doesn't look quite as good. (Intel's XeSS exists somewhere in the middle, in that it works with any modern GPU but looks best when it can leverage Intel's GPU hardware.)

Microsoft is stepping in to try to straighten up this muddle of conceptually similar, executionally different technologies with a new API called DirectSR (the SR is for Super Resolution). The new API was announced in a blog post about Microsoft's 2024 Game Developers Conference sessions, and it was developed by Microsoft "in partnership with GPU hardware vendors."

Nvidia graphics card owners can rest easy; Starfield modders have already added support for Nvidia's Deep Learning Super-Sampling (DLSS) technology (alongside the game's official support for AMD's FSR2 upscaling). But unlocking the full power of that mod will require either paying for a Patreon subscription or using cracks to get around some controversial DRM protecting the most full-featured version of the mod.

Since its initial release on Friday, the "Starfield Upscaler" is currently the most popular Starfield mod listed on clearinghouse NexusMods. That should be welcome news to a significant portion of the PC gaming community running a newer Nvidia GPU that supports the frame-rate-enhancing upscaling technology. That's especially true for the Nvidia owners who were outraged when Bethesda announced an official Starfield partnership with AMD this summer.

In practice, though, the practical effect of that DLSS support might be hard to notice for many players. In Ars' testing on a GTX 2080 Ti gaming rig (running at 2560×1440 resolution, Ultra quality, and 50 percent render resolution), we were able to hit 35 frames per second using both the DLSS mod and the game's built-in AMD FSR2 support (which also works on Nvidia cards). Neither upscaling technology had an apparent performance edge, even as both improved significantly on the ~25 fps frame rate when running at full resolution without any upscaling (and even as DLSS has shown superior visual quality in other tests ).

Enlarge / The RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Last week, AMD announced what are probably the last major GPU launches of this generation of graphics cards: the $449 Radeon RX 7700 XT and $499 Radeon RX 7800 XT . AMD's pricing and performance numbers pit the cards against Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (specifically the $499 16GB version) and the $599 RTX 4070 .

AMD's pricing is aggressive enough that Nvidia is quietly cutting the prices of some 16GB RTX 4060 Ti cards to $449, to match the RX 7700 XT. The announcement about the $50 reduction was buried toward the bottom of an email that Nvidia sent to GPU reviewers ahead of AMD's launch next week; it also drew attention to Nvidia-specific features like DLSS upscaling and frame generation, which compete with AMD's GPU-agnostic FSR , plus recent DLSS improvements that improve ray-tracing performance.

"Finally, as a reminder, market prices can vary from the original launch MSRPs," Nvidia's Brian Burke wrote. "Today, GeForce RTX 4070 is widely available at $599, and GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB is now available at $449. Both of these GPUs are great upgrade choices for gamers seeking their next GPU for the upcoming 2 to 3 years."

Enlarge / AMD's FSR 3 will compete with Nvidia's proprietary DLSS Frame Generation feature starting in September. (credit: AMD)

Even if you're not interested in buying one of the new Radeon graphics cards AMD announced today , the company still has some software-related announcements of interest to anyone who plays games on their PC. And that includes not just owners of older AMD GPUs but people who use Nvidia GeForce or Intel Arc cards, too.

First, AMD is finally ready to reveal more details about FidelityFX Super Resolution version 3, the latest major update to the company's open source upsampling technology. A competitor to Nvidia's proprietary Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) and Intel's GPU-agnostic but nascent XeSS, all of these technologies attempt to generate a high-resolution image by rendering a lower-resolution image, blowing it up and filling in the gaps algorithmically to approximate what a natively rendered image would have looked like.

What GPUs support FSR 3?

Last year, FSR 2.0 went a long way toward making the technology more competitive with DLSS while also working on a wider range of graphics hardware from AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. Contrary to some prior speculation, FSR 3 will continue to support a wide range of old and new GPUs from all three major GPU companies. AMD has confirmed to us that the following graphics hardware should all support FSR 3: