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:

Enlarge / Buying one of these Nvidia cards is a big commitment, both in dollars and case space. Most people who buy them do turn on DLSS and ray tracing, according to Nvidia. So ... what's going on with the folks who don't? (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

As part of its push for the RTX 4070 , Nvidia's new $600 entry point into its Ada Lovelace GPU series, Nvidia has some statistics that, depending on how you look at them, are either completely baffling or entirely believable.

In a blog post and in press materials sent out before the 4070's debut, Nvidia offers stats pulled from "millions of RTX gamers who played RTX capable games" in February 2023. They show that:

• 83 percent of 40 series gamers "turn RT on" (ray tracing)
• 56 percent of 30 series
• 43 percent of 20 series

As for DLSS, Nvidia's AI-accelerated upscaling and frame-generation tool for games that support it, Nvidia writes that 79 percent of 40 series, 71 percent of 30 series, and 68 percent of 20 series owners turned the feature on.

Enlarge / AMD's artistic interpretation of how FSR works. It's a bit more complicated than this four-box rendering implies—especially when we consider how much better FSR 2.0 is.

Out of all the battles between graphics card manufacturers, the fight over image upsampling and reconstruction is the most interesting to follow, mostly because more gamers can actually take advantage of the results. This week, that battle has become even hotter, thanks to AMD finally landing a considerable blow.

Despite only working on one game as of press time, AMD's new FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) feature finally passes the sniff test that its "1.0" version flunked last year. This week's updated "2.0" version works on a larger number of GPUs in the wild than Nvidia's comparable option, and it lets players get closer to good-enough pixel counts when running on 1440p or 4K panels. But the caveats in play leave us viewing the results as good news for older or mid-range GPUs rather than the solution to the supply issues everyone is facing.

A brief explainer on Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR

Image upsampling, as delivered by the likes of Nvidia and AMD, can take a game with a smaller pixel resolution and intelligently blow it up to fill popular screen resolutions like 1080p, 1440p, and 4K. If these systems work as advertised, they'll produce something comparable to raw pixels—or sometimes look sharper since they also include an anti-aliasing pass to remove "jaggies" and other visual defects.