AMD 的 FSR 4 超分技术今年将登陆掌机 PC，Steam Deck 支持可能更久

Render me this

Handheld PC games could be set for a bit of visual spit 'n' shine, as AMD have confirmed plans to bring FSR 4 – their newest, prettiest upscaling tech – to the kind of dinky Radeon APUs used by portables. AMD Computing & Graphics exec Jack Huynh, speaking to Korean media including The Elec, detailed a two-pronged approach: they’ll make new APUs built with native FSR 4 support, as well as a special version of the upscaler that can run on older integrated graphics chips, both by the end of 2026.

That’s what machine translation says, anyway, and I’m aware that overegging a translated report can lead to the terrible fate of a public Jeremy admonishment. But there are multiple references to both the new Radeon chips and the, again this is a translated quote I’m sorry please don’t hurt me, "lightweight" version of FSR 4. It’s the latter you’ll be after if you already own a fairly recent handheld, like the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X or Lenovo Legion Go 2, as the FSR 4 we already have on desktops can be noticeably sharper than cleaner than FSR 3.1 and its predecessors.

That does come at the cost of a smaller performance boost: FSR 4 on Quality mode, for instance, typically runs a little slower than FSR 3.1 on Quality mode. It’s still much quicker than running at un-upscaled, native resolution, mind, and I’d be interested to test whether FSR 4’s polished visuals make it more viable to use the speediest Performance and Ultra Performance settings on a handheld screen. These modes sometimes work, in certain games, on the older versions, but if one has a better chance of Performance mode not devolving into unreadable pixel mush, that might actually make it preferable to Balanced or Quality. Which could, in turn, lead to higher performance anyway.

However, it’s not clear whether that 'end of the year timeline' also applies to the most widely-owned PC handhelds, the Steam Deck and Steam Deck OLED. AMD have previously said that bringing FSR 4 to their RDNA 2 architecture, on which the Deck duo’s APUs are based, will take until 2027; RDNA 3, which forms the basis of most other current handheld chips, was always intended to get FSR 4 support this year, albeit with more of a focus on desktop graphics cards. There’s seemingly nothing in The Elec’s report on whether this special APU version has cracked the RDNA 2 code early, but that would be a mighty assumption to make. Maybe too mighty.

That’s not to say the Steam Deck will be denied FSR 4 forever, just that it might take a while longer than fresher Allies and Legions. AMD’s stance has always been that the higher hardware demands of FSR 4 will make it harder to get working on older architectures, with even the original desktop launch being exclusive to their newest RDNA 4 cards. Ironically, one exception to the (current) lack of APU support is the Steam Machine, which added FSR 4 via firmware update a few days after launch – though that processor was made semi-custom, with Valve’s considerable resources, once FSR 4 already existed.