AMD FSR Redstone: A Game-Changing Yet Complex Upgrade for Radeon Gamers

Today, AMD is quietly rolling out its latest graphics and performance-boosting technology, FSR Redstone, which might take a moment to fully grasp. It certainly took me a bit to get my head around it.

The bright side is that in just three months, AMD has significantly increased the number of games supporting its flagship machine-learning upscaling tech, FSR4, to over 200 titles. Additionally, it’s introducing ML-based frame generation (yes, those “fake frames”) for more than 30 games. Both of these advancements can greatly enhance your framerate while maintaining better image quality than what FSR 1, 2, or 3 offered. You can check out the complete list of supported games and download the 25.12.1 driver to give it a shot—if you own a Radeon 9000 series card.

On a less straightforward note, AMD initially promised that “FSR Redstone” would debut in the latter half of this year, but it seems they are primarily integrating FSR4 into Redstone. FSR 4 is now rebranded as “AMD FSR Upscaling (formerly AMD FSR4),” with Redstone serving as the overarching name for the entire current suite of machine-learning products.

The integration might stem from the fact that AMD currently has only one game showcasing its new FSR Ray Regeneration technique—Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, which launched with it last month—and no titles featuring FSR Radiance Caching, which developers can start implementing in their games by 2026.

It’s a bit confusing, but you won’t find options for FSR Redstone (or even FSR 4) in most games just yet. You’ll need a Radeon RX 9000-series card, as AMD is still keeping the machine-learning versions of FSR exclusive to that lineup. Additionally, you’ll have to access your AMD Software app to enable “AMD FSR Upscaling” and/or “AMD FSR Frame Generation” under the Gaming > Graphics tab, and then activate AMD FSR 3.1 (or occasionally 4) within the game itself.

This is necessary because the advanced ML versions of these features must be activated on a per-game basis, but AMD can handle that for you (and developers) through the driver, provided the games already support FSR 3.1 or FSR 4.

I picked up an AMD RX 9070 XT myself after Nvidia’s last move, but the adoption of AMD’s latest hardware has been somewhat sluggish. They haven’t yet appeared in the Steam Hardware Survey, suggesting that less than 0.15 percent of current PC gamers are using them—though a generic “AMD Radeon(TM) Graphics” has seen a 0.75 percent increase in share on Steam over the past year.

That share could see a boost now that the Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT are finally available at their originally promised MSRP. They’re solid cards for the price; check out our review from March 2025 for more details.