Exciting news is milling on AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution technology! It would appear that upgrading to the latest and greatest in upscaling will become incredibly smooth for gamers rocking future AMD Radeon RX 9000 series cards. The word is that AMD FSR 4 could be made out to be an almost plug-and-play upgrade to games already using FSR 3.1.
The Whisper in the Wind: A Driver-Level Swap?
The rumor, as it comes from a few pretty reliable sources-including @Kepler_L2 on Twitter-suggests the RDNA 4 drivers for the RX 9000 series GPUs will automatically handle the FSR upgrade in the background. Just imagine: instead of having game developers patch their titles every time AMD releases a new FSR version, the driver simply swaps out the FSR 3.1 files (.dll extensions) for the shiny new FSR 4 versions.
That aligns with what we witnessed at CES 2025, where AMD demonstrated FSR 4 operating in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, and for what it's worth, there was no word about a game patch being required for it. That does feed the hypothesis that this will be a very smooth, driver-driven upgrade process.
"Just Works" for FSR 3.1 Titles
Were AMD actually taking advantage of FSR 4, it would be an absolute gamer dream come true, as this ostensibly means any title that supports the former should, by default, be leveraging the latter automatically on compatible hardware. Imagine tossing your favorite FSR 3.1-enabled game with a brand-new RX 9000 series card and having possibly upgraded visuals, no work whatsoever needed by said game developers!
Of course, for those games that haven't adopted FSR 3.1 to date, it seems developers would still have to implement basic FSR support to leverage the AI-enhanced upscaling available through FSR 4. But once that base is established, future variants of FSR could prove significantly easier to incorporate - courtesy of AMD's driver magic.
PlayStation Ports Leading the Charge
Ironically, it would appear some recent PlayStation-to-PC ports have been clearing the way for this smooth upgrade path: a recent FSR 3.1 update has just been delivered to The Last of Us Part 1, among others like Ghost of Tsushima and God of War Ragnarok. Speculation is rife that this, and other updates, may actually be paving the way for this automated injection of FSR 4 on future AMD GPUs.
A Canny Move from AMD
If the rumors prove accurate, AMD has played this very smart. Making FSR 3.1 forward-compatible, with the ability to enable driver-level upgrades, is just genius and avoids those frustrating situations where older games are stuck on ancient upscaling tech, despite your shiny new GPU being well capable of much better. AMD is working to avoid that, at least, by ensuring gamers can access the newest and greatest in upscaling technology without having to wait for game-specific updates every time.
The ability to simply "drop-in DLL replacement" for FSR 4 could be a game-changer for future graphics upgrades, making them feel far more impactful and less dependent on developer intervention to include in older titles.
