Player Drops FSR 4, Switches to FSR 3.1 After RX 9070 XT

A gamer recently invested in an RX 9070 XT, lured by AMD’s promise that the new FSR 4 technology would transform visual fidelity. FSR 4, AMD’s automatic upscaling tool, is designed to rival competing solutions on the market. Yet, despite the official toggle in the Adrenalin 25.12.1 driver update, real‑world tests in the user’s favorite titles fell short. The strict prerequisites mean that a vast swath of games cannot reap the benefits.

To upgrade a game from FSR 3.1 to FSR 4, AMD stipulates three non‑negotiable conditions: the game must ship with a signed DLL library, run exclusively on DirectX 12, and avoid any modifications that alter the scaler. If any of these criteria are missing, the feature is entirely disabled. Consequently, AMD’s compatibility list leans heavily toward the latest AAA releases, leaving many beloved classics out of reach.

Red Dead Redemption 2 exemplifies this shortfall. The game still relies on older FSR 2 and DLSS 2.2, lacking the essential DLSS 3.1 foundation required for FSR 4 to function. Similar constraints affect titles like Escape From Tarkov, illustrating a scenario where owners of AMD’s latest GPUs are unable to leverage the advertised visual enhancement.

AMD has made it clear that enabling FSR 4 through its driver works exclusively under the DirectX 12 architecture, effectively barring any Vulkan‑based titles from accessing the visual enhancement. As a result, popular games such as Doom: The Dark Ages and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are left without the upscale, leaving players disappointed who had expected their new cards to support a broader catalogue.

Despite these compatibility challenges, AMD’s new offering remains a substantial win for gamers, officially covering more than 85 releases and expanding to over 268 titles through community‑compiled lists. This progress means players can enjoy top‑tier graphical scaling with a single click in the control panel, giving a visual boost to industry giants like Cyberpunk 2077, Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, Monster Hunter Wilds, and Hogwarts Legacy.

Nevertheless, Nvidia maintains a clear advantage in flexibility, with its application enabling forced scaling on more than 400 titles, automatically benefiting games such as Red Dead Redemption 2 and many others. While the RX 9070 XT is a robust graphics card and its scaler delivers genuinely good results, the current support issues suggest that FSR 4 alone may not justify a switch to this new GPU for users whose libraries are dominated by classic titles, at least for now.