A test drive of these Radeon RX 9000-exclusive performance tools

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun

Today, AMD are prodding the launch button for FSR Redstone: a suite of upscaling, frame generation, and ray tracing upgrades that, just maybe, might stop Nvidia DLSS 4’s campaign of strutting across the canteen and slapping FSR’s lunch tray over in front of all the other graphics card technologies.

To achieve this, FSR has become the monster it fights. Gone are the technologically simplified, GPU-agnostic measures employed by previous FSR versions; Redstone deals exclusively in more sophisticated machine-learning tools that specifically require the latest Radeon graphics hardware to function. The RX 9000 series, to be precise, just like how new DLSS editions always demand the newest, most AI-embracing Nvidia RTX cards. This lack of support for older Radeons is a major strategic shift, but AMD insist that the image quality and stability improvements will be worth it.

To find out, I got hold of a preview driver for Redstone and bunged a Radeon RX 9070 XT into the RPS test rig. And, with apologies to anyone who bought an RX 7900 XTX: AMD might have a point.

AMD FSR Upscaling: the FPS boost formerly known as FSR 4

We’ve actually seen before one of Redstone’s constituent parts before. ‘AMD FSR Upscaling,’ as it’s now known, is just FSR 4 – the AI-assisted upscaler that launched alongside the RX 9000 series months ago – by another name. I tried a few game benchmarks – Cyberpunk 2077, Blops 7, and F1 25 – to see if the new Redstone driver would unlock any visual or performance improvements, but its inclusion as a rebranding exercise was confirmed by a trio of unchanged results. And, later, by AMD confirming the lack of Redstone upscaling changes via email.

Still, we’ve never really looked at FSR 4 on RPS, so now seems like a good chance. Again, like DLSS, this upscaler is based on an AI model that’s strapped to a chair and forced to watch moving images until it learns how to reconstruct low-rez game frames into much sharper pictures. Compared to the dumber temporal upscaling of FSR 3, the new(ish) FSR Upscaling is noticeably sharper, especially when upscaling to a less pixel-rich monitor resolution like 1080p. More impressively, it’s barely distinguishable from DLSS 4, an upscaler that’s benefited from nearly a decade of RTX machine learning refinement – and got an even crisper Transformer model at the start of 2025.

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4K, FSR Upscaling on Quality

In motion, I still think DLSS 4 edges it, being marginally better at keeping fuzziness away from small, fast-moving details like hair. But looking for differences like this is properly anal, magnifying glass-against-the-screen stuff, and FSR Upscaling or FSR 4 or whatever you want to call it deserves an approving nod for looking this good on what is, essentially, its first try.

FSR Frame Generation: a finer class of fake frames

Redstone also adds some AI smarts to FSR’s frame generation, and while the upscaling component is a welcome but not wholly fresh addition to RX 9000 GPUs, this new frame gen represents a honking great upgrade. Just, not always in places you might think.

First, a quick reminder on how frame generation works. Using the image data from frames that your PC renders normally, FSR or DLSS can create new frames, then slot them in-between the rendered ones for overall higher FPS and – usually – smoother motion. It’s not as much of a no-brainer as good upscaling, as frame generation increases input lag, can introduce artifacts, and may even make motion look worse if it isn’t implemented well, but everyone who’s seen both Nvidia’s and AMD’s attempts would surely agree that DLSS has been the better choice by miles.

After Redstone, though, FSR frame gen is far more competitive. Swapping FSR 3/3.1’s software-based generation for hardware-based machine learning appears to help make sure those fake frames are delivered in a cleaner, more consistent manner, smoothing out the old version’s occasional jitteriness and massively improving image quality. I saw a lot less ghosting in Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 25, which exhibited phantom wheels and scraggly shadows using FSR 3, was cleaned up nicely with the Redstone version. Which, confusingly, is just called ‘FSR Frame Generation.’

FSR 3 frame generation (pre-Redstone) AMD FSR Frame Generation (post-Redstone) Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/EA

It is slower than FSR 3 frame gen, but not to a bothersome extent: with F1 25 running at 1440p, on the Ultra High preset and Quality-level FSR upscaling enabled, a 288fps average on the older version dropped to the 243fps with the Redstone upgrade. 45fps looks like a lot but when you’re this far above 200fps, the frames come so fast that the difference is practically imperceptible, and since most gaming monitors top out at 165Hz refresh rates, you’d need a mighty expensive setup to even get all those frames on-screen. Blops 7’s results were more within the realm of us mortals, but still, maxed-out 1440p dropping from 143fps to 139fps is a negligible drawback of the new system.

That said, nu-FSR Frame Generation still suffers from the same problems as DLSS’s. There are sometimes imperfections present on individual frames, like the tear-like effect on the red and white curb in the corner of the F1 25 shot below. And while these are easy to miss in motion, AMD hasn’t found an answer for the accompanying rise in input latency, which can be felt even with their latest Radeon Anti-Lag 2 trying to keep everything responsive.

FSR 3 frame generation (pre-Redstone) AMD FSR Frame Generation (post-Redstone) Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/EA

Quality-wise, mind, FSR has again caught up with DLSS. Nvidia would obviously point to the choice of 2x, 3x, or 4x multipliers that DLSS 4’s Multi-Frame Generation (MFG) allows for, while FSR sticks to a DLSS 3-style 2x system, but saturating yourself with AI frames has never been that appealing. Partly because 3x and 4x dial up input lag even more, and partly because, like F1 25 going the speed of an actual F1 car, there’s only so many frames you can generate in a second before your monitor’s refresh rate runs out of bandwidth for them. Redstone sticks to making improvements where it counts.

Ray Regeneration: a graphics upgrade for graphics upgrades

In yet another case of DLSS parity-pushing, FSR now has its own version of Ray Reconstruction. Both technologies are a kind of ray tracing rendering trick, whereby machine learning (yes, more of it) is employed to figure out how to present computationally expensive RT and path tracing effects without so many of the visual artifacts, chiefly static-like image noise, that they otherwise risk introducing.

In practice, the improvements DLSS Ray Reconstruction makes are small, but they do exist, and they rarely come with a meaningful performance cost. That’s if it isn’t actively speeding up framerates, like Cyberpunk 2077’s RR implementation does.

First impressions of FSR Ray Regeneration are limited, because it’s currently only supported in one game: Blops 7, which also happens to limit its traced rays to reflections, not lighting or shadows. All the same, it’s an encouraging glimpse, with Ray Regeneration effectively denoising reflective surfaces for clearer, sharper effects:

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FSR Ray Regeneration on

The performance cost was a fat sack of nothin’, too. At 1440p with Extreme settings, FSR upscaling on Quality mode, and those ray-traced reflections enabled, the RX 9070 XT averaged 81fps before barely dropping to 79fps with Ray Regeneration added. Likewise, enabling Redstone’s new frame generation had it running at 144fps before Ray Regeneration and 139fps after. Not exactly the kinds of drops that would have you planning a new PC build.

Radiance Caching: no, wait, nevermind

Sliiiiight issue with testing Radiance Caching: it isn’t out for any games yet. And won’t be, with Warhammer 40,000: Darktide as the only confirmed recipient, until 2026.

I’m willing to be intrigued by it, at least. It "speeds up ray traced lighting" by predicting where the light rays in a scene are going to bounce, saving on GPU load and potentially reducing the performance tax that ray and path tracing effects extract. Again, it’s based around a machine learning model, one that that’s been trained to learn how light behaves as well as how to quickly pocket and refer to lighting simulation data from a ‘neural radiance cache.’ Hence why it can supposedly act so quickly, and why it can, hopefully, produce accurate shadows and illumination without making wildly incorrect guesses. Hopefully.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/EA

Even without this final piece, FSR Redstone is a refreshingly assertive statement from AMD. Nvidia have been showing their necks to the Radeon business, bringing out two successive generations of graphics cards marked by high prices and weak performance gains, and yet AMD have never gone for the jugular. There’s a sense that this is changing: Redstone has identified that the real reason to buy GeForce is the superiority of DLSS, and simply by copying Nvidia’s homework, has cut that advantage down to a sliver.

To be weapons-grade pernickety, and in an article with this many screenshot comparisons as this, I may as well, DLSS upscaling specifically remains very, very, very slightly better-looking to my eyes. But generally, FSR no longer feels like the losing choice – the tech toolkit you have to put up with because you couldn’t or wouldn’t pay a GeForce premium. That’s a great development in itself, and with any luck, it might even convince Nvidia to up their game for the RTX 60 series.

On balance, I also think it’s worth the loss of cross-GPU compatibility that previous FSR versions enjoyed. Keeping new features available for owners of older games is always a noble endeavour, but ultimately, the point of these features has always been to make games look nicer or run faster – and hardware-based tools, as DLSS and now FSR Redstone have proved, are clearly the best way to go about it. AMD could still have it both ways by making future FSR upgrades compatible with the RX 9000 series, but just as the GTX 1060 had to be left behind when DLSS and ray tracing first came along, there does need to be a transition point for truly new tech. For FSR, that just happens to be here.