Seen AMD FSR 3 or HYPR-RX marketed around and want to know more? Today, I’ll be walking you through everything you need to know about AMD FSR 3, including how its new features work, what graphics cards can use it, and whether or not we can expect the technology to eventually make its way to Steam Deck and consoles. Let’s not waste any more time, and get into it!
Table of Contents
What is AMD FSR 3?
AMD FSR 3 is the latest version of AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution image upscaling technology. Compared to the basics shared by earlier versions of FSR and Nvidia Image Scaling, FSR 3 further improves on the image quality of upscaling and adds AMD Fluid Motion Frames in order to further increase the FPS gain offered by enabling FSR.
What are AMD Fluid Motion Frames?
AMD Fluid Motion Frames is AMD’s response to Nvidia’s DLSS 3.0 Frame Generation. While DLSS 3.5 uses an Nvidia GPU’s AI hardware in order to interpolate additional frames, AMD will be doing it without AI, which could in theory result in worse image quality. The performance gain seems similar, though, at least in the limited testing shown to outlets like Digital Foundry. I’ve embedded their impressions below:
FSR 3 is slated to be added to a wide variety of games. Since it’s an open source standard and AMD is partnered with so many game developers, GPU Frame Interpolation without AI will be available in a ton of games before long.
Through AMD HYPR-RX exclusively, FSR 3 is also going to offer another feature: Fluid Motion Frames in every DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 game, regardless of their FSR support. More on that in a moment!
What is AMD HYPR-RX?
AMD HYPR-RX is AMD’s upcoming all-in-one setting for optimizing game performance and input latency, and it works by implementing multiple AMD technologies in tandem.
Below, I’ve listed the components of AMD HYPR-RX and what they do:
- Radeon Boost — Dynamic resolution scaling based on mouse movement, helping improve performance by kicking in during high-motion scenarios and turning off when there’s little/no camera movement to preserve image quality afterward.
- Anti-Lag (+) — Caps and moderates in-game framerate to prevent GPU performance from peaking and thermal throttling. Works pretty much the same as Nvidia’s Anti-Lag.
- Radeon Super Resolution — Uses the same image upscaling as AMD FSR.
- AMD Fluid Motion Frames — Uses the same Frame Generation as AMD FSR 3. However, it can be enabled on a driver level through HYPR-RX.
Additionally, unlike FSR 3, which has widespread GPU support, HYPR-RX is only intended for RDNA 3-based (RX 7000 Series) AMD GPUs and newer.
What Graphics Cards Can Use AMD FSR 3?
AMD FSR 3’s spread of GPU support is pretty good, well-distributed across the past several generations of AMD and Nvidia GPUs alike. FSR3 with Frame Generation should also work on modern Intel GPUs without issue. Below, I’ve listed specific GPU series from AMD and Nvidia supported by FSR 3, and which ones do and don’t support Frame Generation.
AMD FSR 3 with Frame Generation is slated to be compatible with the following GPU series:
- AMD Radeon RX 7000 Series (Recommended)
- AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series
- AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT and 5700
- Nvidia RTX 40 Series
- Nvidia RTX 30 Series
- Nvidia RTX 20 Series
AMD FSR 3 also supports the following GPU series, but not Fluid Motion Frames with them:
- AMD Radeon RX 5000 Series (Except 5700 XT and 5700)
- AMD RX 590
- Nvidia GTX 16 Series
- Nvidia GTX 10 Series
How Does FSR 3 Work Without AI?
As contentious as DLSS 3.5 Frame Generation is, it makes a lot of sense to use onboard AI hardware in order to generate extra in-game frames. How, then, is AMD bringing this same Frame Generation capability to hardware without machine learning or AI capabilities?
Simple: by using the same classic frame interpolation technology used by TVs. On TVs, frame interpolation notoriously results in increased input lag and a soap opera effect. But by doing this frame interpolation directly on the GPU, the severe input lag problem can be sidestepped, although of course interpolated high FPS won’t feel as good as real high FPS.
Will AMD FSR 3 Come to Steam Deck?
Most likely! FSR 2 already has support on Steam Deck in all the games that support it. However, Steam Deck’s FSR 3 support will likely be limited to per-game (instead of replacing the universal FSR 1.0 toggles Deck has by default), and the utility of Frame Generation will be very limited on a low-power handheld that may struggle to reach 60 FPS in your games of choice.
In other words, I wouldn’t expect much benefit from the new Frame Generation features from FSR 3 when it comes to Steam Deck, though I could be mistaken. Other improvements to FSR’s visual upscaling and performance gains should still be present, though.
Will AMD FSR 3 Come to Consoles?
AMD FSR 1 and 2 have already been implemented into current-generation console games, so it feels like AMD FSR 3 is naturally going to follow suit, especially for titles trying to target 120 Hz. However, it’s been stated by AMD to Digital Foundry that Fluid Motion Frames works poorly when the source framerate is under 60 FPS, so it’s unlikely that we’ll see the Frame Generation feature of FSR 3 in use on console on games that can’t run at 60 FPS without it.
It seems that while AMD’s Frame Generation solution has quite a lot of potential, that potential is largely meant for high refresh rate PC gaming where 60 FPS is already attainable without Frame Generation. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like AMD will be able to salvage sub-60 FPS experiences with Frame Generation like we see with DLSS, but we’ll need more time and testing to become available to verify how significant that discrepancy actually is.