AMD's newest upscaler has reached handheld PCs, and Retro Game Corps has put it through its paces on the Xbox Ally range. The short version from Russ's testing: across the games he tried, FSR 4 gives an average gain of about five to six frames per second while matching or improving image quality compared with older FSR versions (01:43). On a handheld, where every frame counts, that is a real upgrade for free.
What changed
AMD's own announcement describes FSR 4.1 as a new, more efficient version of its machine-learning upscaler, built for a wider range of hardware including the Ryzen Z2 Extreme chips inside the ROG Xbox Ally X. Pure Xbox reported the same announcement as bringing FSR 4.1 to the Xbox Ally handhelds and Xbox Series X|S. The difference from earlier FSR versions is the approach: instead of spatial or temporal tricks, it uses a trained model to reconstruct detail, which is why it can look cleaner at lower internal resolutions.
How to turn it on
On the handhelds it currently arrives as a preview graphics driver. Russ walks through downloading it from the Update Center in Armoury Crate and enabling AMD FSR Upscaling (03:11). One practical snag he points out: you can't switch it on mid-game. Close the game, flip the toggle, and relaunch (04:52).
What the tests show
The trick that makes the numbers work is running lower internal resolutions. Russ compares Quality mode, which renders at 720p for a 1080p screen, with Performance mode at 540p (05:16), and notes that on a small handheld display the difference between presets is much harder to see, which plays to FSR 4's strengths (06:34). His game-by-game results include:
- Cyberpunk 2077: FSR 2.1 Quality against FSR 4 Performance, using the built-in benchmark and gameplay (07:47).
- Control Resonant: better frame rates, but the image looks slightly worse in Performance mode than in Quality (10:44).
- Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart: frame-rate gains undermined by periodic hitching that he found distracting enough not to want to play it in its current state (13:53).
- Ghost of Tsushima and Spider-Man: Miles Morales: side-by-side comparisons against FSR 3.1.4 (13:59).
Frame generation
FSR 4's frame generation also gets a look. Russ's view is that frame generation works well when it pushes the result past about 80 fps, because the game underneath is then running at around 40 fps, which he says feels great (17:55). Locking to 60 fps with frame generation to save battery, he found, buys only about ten minutes and isn't worth the extra latency (18:36). He also prefers having FSR 4 in the official driver over community workarounds, because it makes the feature accessible to people who just want to play (19:42).
The takeaway
If you own a Z2 Extreme handheld, the preview driver is worth installing, with two caveats from the testing: check each game, because some, like Rift Apart, still misbehave, and use frame generation where the game already runs well. Owners of the base Xbox Ally should note that Russ's tests are on the Z2 Extreme models.
Viewers mostly reported similar results. Several said frame generation looks much better than before, one shared steps for enabling it under SteamOS, and others said they were seeing the same hitching in other games.
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