But while FSR 4 has been praised for narrowing the visual gap with NVIDIA’s upscaling solution, it remains exclusive to RDNA 4 graphics cards—leaving RDNA 3 and older Radeon users without official support despite strong demand, News.Az reports, citing foreign media.
The debut of the Radeon RX 9000 Series desktop GPUs also marked the arrival of AMD’s latest AI-powered rendering stack. FSR 4 has since expanded to include Frame Generation and Ray Reconstruction under the company’s FSR Redstone initiative. However, the technology relies on FP8-capable AI hardware available only in RDNA 4 GPUs, making it incompatible, at least officially, with earlier Radeon architectures.
FSR 4 quickly became one of the standout features of the Radeon RX 9070 XT launch, as the updated FSR Super Resolution significantly improved visual fidelity and effectively closed the long-standing quality gap with DLSS. Yet limiting the technology to just three desktop GPUs represents a departure from AMD’s historical approach, as previous versions of FSR were open-source and broadly platform-agnostic.
This shift has frustrated RDNA 3 users, who feel left behind despite owning relatively recent hardware. The issue extends beyond desktop PCs to AMD-powered gaming handhelds, many of which run RDNA 3.5 graphics. These devices are seen as platforms where FSR 4 could deliver some of its most meaningful benefits, but they remain unsupported.
Adding to the controversy, AMD’s release of an updated FSR software development kit last year inadvertently included source code indicating that an INT8 version of FSR 4 existed and could run on RDNA 3 GPUs such as the Radeon RX 7800 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX. This discovery prompted enthusiasts to experiment with FSR 4 on older hardware, finding that while the results were visually impressive, performance costs were noticeably higher than with FSR 3.
At CES 2026, AMD was asked directly about the possibility of bringing FSR 4 to older Radeon GPUs, particularly for the growing handheld market and devices like the upcoming Steam Machine. Responding to the question, David McAfee, Vice President and General Manager of Ryzen CPUs and Radeon Graphics at AMD, said the move remains “a very difficult technical challenge for us to solve,” while signaling that such support is unlikely in the near future.
For now, AMD appears committed to keeping FSR 4 exclusive to RDNA 4, even as pressure grows from users eager to see the technology expanded beyond the latest generation of Radeon GPUs.
