AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution Just Went Live, and It's Open to Everyone
AMD launched FSR today, an open-source upscaling tech that boosts frame rates and works across GPUs, not just its own RDNA cards.
AMD shipped FidelityFX Super Resolution today, and the headline detail matters more than the tech itself: it’s open. FSR renders your game at a lower internal resolution, then uses a spatial upscaling and sharpening pass to reconstruct something close to native image quality, all in the name of squeezing more frames out of your GPU. That’s the same basic pitch as Nvidia’s DLSS, which has been turning heads (and benchmarks) since 2019. The difference is who gets to use it.
DLSS is locked to Nvidia’s RTX cards because it leans on dedicated Tensor cores and a neural network trained on Nvidia’s own hardware. FSR doesn’t need any of that. AMD built it to run on a much wider swath of silicon, including older GPUs and, notably, competitors’ cards. If you’re sitting on a several-year-old GTX card or a last-gen console, FSR is designed to work for you too, not just people who bought into AMD’s latest RDNA lineup.
Why “open” is the interesting part
This is a classic AMD move, and it’s the same playbook they ran with FreeSync against Nvidia’s G-Sync: rather than build a walled garden, undercut it with something free and broadly compatible. It won’t necessarily match DLSS pixel-for-pixel in image quality, especially since it isn’t leaning on machine learning trained per-title the way DLSS 2.0 does. But “good enough and available on the GPU you already own” is a genuinely compelling pitch, especially in a year when actually buying a new graphics card at anything resembling MSRP has been nearly impossible.
The catch at launch is game support. FSR is rolling out with only a handful of supported titles on day one, which is the usual chicken-and-egg problem any new graphics technology faces. Developers need a reason to implement it, and gamers need games that support it before they care. AMD says more titles are coming in the following months, and given that FSR doesn’t require the kind of per-game AI training DLSS does, integrating it should be a comparatively lighter lift for studios.
Worth watching: does this become the industry-standard upscaling layer that everyone from Nvidia-adjacent devs to Xbox and PlayStation studios can build around, since it isn’t tied to one vendor’s hardware? Or does DLSS keep its edge on raw image quality and stay the premium option for people who already bought into the RTX ecosystem? My guess is FSR wins on reach even if it doesn’t win on pure fidelity, simply because “works on everything” beats “works on my $1500 GPU I couldn’t actually buy at retail” for most people. Given how brutal the GPU shortage has been all year, a free performance boost that doesn’t require buying new hardware is going to be an easy sell.