AMD has pulled off a miraculous comeback with its new GPUs, with the AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT practically pointing and laughing at the RTX 5070 as it sputters with 12GB of VRAM. It’s not just the new GPUs that wowed me with this launch, though, but also the feature set with FSR 4, and AMD just needs to make one change to this feature set to knock one of Nvidia’s key competitive advantages out of the running – make FSR 4 an open standard that will run on Nvidia Tensor cores.
Can it be done? After enjoying my first FSR 4 test at CES earlier in January, and being really impressed by the vast improvement in quality, my first question was whether you could run it on other GPUs. The answer, of course, was no, you need a Radeon RX 9070 or 9070 XT GPU to run it. However, after pressing further, AMD told me that there was no technical reason why you couldn’t run the tech itself on Nvidia Tensor cores, although last-gen AMD GPUs might struggle with it. It’s just a case of whether AMD wants to open it up or not.
Conversely, of course, there’s also a good chance that the vastly-improved AI cores on AMD’s latest GPUs could run Nvidia DLSS upscaling too, but Nvidia doesn’t have a history of opening up its standards, unlike AMD. Nvidia will still have competitive advantages – AMD doesn’t have an answer to multi frame gen yet, after all – but opening up FSR 4 upscaling could make all the difference.
Of course, you could argue that AMD only opened up previous versions of FSR to all GPUs because it knew it was at a competitive disadvantage. Let’s face it, until AMD FSR 4 came along, FSR was bad. Even on the Quality preset you could expect your eyes to be assaulted with horrible digital noise surrounding the edges of moving objects, with ghosting and visible trails, while the rest of the game looked blurry. It’s not so bad on a tiny Steam Deck screen, but you really notice it on a 4K monitor. Until now, if you wanted upscaling with reasonable image quality, DLSS was the only way, and Nvidia extended its advantage even further when it launched DLSS 4 with the transformer model earlier this year.
AMD might have been able to say that FSR would work on any GPU, but the obvious answer to that point is, “yeah, but why would you want to?” Comparatively, Nvidia’s DLSS tech is proprietary and only runs on GeForce RTX GPUs. If a game launches with only DLSS support, and no FSR support, as we saw with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle at the end of 2024, then you instantly see a benefit from owning an Nvidia GPU.
With FSR 4, though, the tech is genuinely good. It’s better than Nvidia DLSS with the CNN model, and it’s close to the image quality achievable with the new Nvidia transformer model (I actually struggle to tell the difference). If FSR 4 was an open standard that also worked on Nvidia GPUs, it would be much more likely to get widespread game support, and such a strategy could even end up with a universal AI upscaling system being adopted that works on all GPUs. That might seem like a pipedream, but it’s basically happened with active sync.
When FreeSync came along, an open active sync standard from AMD, monitor makers were keen to adopt it, as it didn’t require any proprietary Nvidia hardware. Fast forward to now, and “G-Sync compatible” is a commonplace bullet on the best gaming monitors, without the need for Nvidia hardware. In my experience, you can also force G-Sync to be enabled on most FreeSync monitors anyway – I happily run G-Sync on my AOC U28G2GR4 monitor, and that doesn’t have any G-Sync support at all.
That’s what can happen when you open up your standards, and it’s really good for gamers. AMD might want to hug FSR 4 tight to its chest and keep it as a proprietary tech, but I’d advise the company against doing that. Nvidia DLSS is the industry standard for upscaling now, and you’re going to really struggle to compete if you keep your equivalent behind a locked door. Open it up, though, and we could have a genuinely great upscaling tech that works across all GPUs.
So AMD, today I’m calling on you to do the right thing. If it’s technically possible, let’s make FSR 4 work on every GPU with compatible AI hardware. Give FSR 4 to everyone, and you could potentially get your GPU market share out of limbo, and remove one of the main weapons in Nvidia’s proprietary armory.
For more information about FSR 4, check out my AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT review, where I test the new tech in Marvel Rivals and Call of Duty Black Ops 6. You can also read our guide to the best graphics card if you’re thinking about buying a new GPU now.
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