AMD has launched FSR 3.1 on five games, bringing better image quality and stability than FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.2. At the same time, FSR’s frame generation has been decoupled from the upscaling portion, permitting it to work with competing upscaling methods.
AMD has unveiled the latest version of its upscaling technology, delivering better quality by reducing flickering, shimmering, and ghosting, boosting gamers’ experience at all preset levels. Announced back in March 2024, FSR 3.1 is the true successor to FSR 2.2 upscaling algorithm. Unlike FSR 3.0 which mainly debuted frame generation, FSR 3.1 finally upgrades the ageing upscaling portion to focus on visual fidelity.
Additionally, FSR 3.1 brings Native-AA quality mode – equivalent to Nvidia’s DLAA – to new games, further enhancing games’ image quality. There’s even a simplified upgrade path for developers alongside support for Vulkan and Xbox Game Development Kit, which should encourage its deployment on consoles.
Perhaps the pièce de résistance, FSR 3.1 separates upscaling from frame generation. While Radeon users will benefit from these upgrades, those rocking competing products from Intel and Nvidia will benefit more. Thanks to the decoupling, GeForce RTX 2000 users who otherwise don’t get the benefits of Nvidia’s Frame Gen can pair DLSS with AMD’s solution, reaching frame rates unobtainable before. It’s something we’ve seen before with the release of Ghost of Tsushima, but it’s now coming to more games.
You can get a glimpse at these improvements in the video below.
AMD FSR 3.1 is now available in Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut, Horizon Forbidden West Complete Edition, Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, and will be coming soon to God of War Ragnarök.
According to AMD’s testing, the combination of FSR 3 Performance mode and frame generation improved fps by 2.5 to 4.4 times compared to native. That said, most users are unlikely to combine frame generation with such a low FSR setting, as the image quality would suffer greatly. A more plausible choice would be FSR Quality or Native-AA combined with frame generation, which should deliver the best image quality while maintaining high fps.
While FSR upscaling and frame generation did come in handy for me when playing Anno 1800, I am more excited to see FSR Native-AA mode in more games. Since most games I play – Enlisted, Destiny 2, etc – run well on my RX 7900 XT, I would rather use the extra headroom to improve image quality by removing aliasing. I guess I am old-school when it comes to game rendering preferences.
Allowing FSR frame generation to work on competitors’ hardware is a fantastic move from AMD. Even if it won’t help attract more users to Radeon GPUs, it’s good publicity for the brand, showing that it cares about gamers. I can’t imagine what the Radeon team could pull out using dedicated hardware like Nvidia’s tensor cores.