AMD has been teasing us with its next-gen FSR 4 "Redstone" upscaling tech since May. But finally, belatedly, we have a launch date. Redstone will be released on December 10. Huzzah!
Now, as we've detailed on multiple occasions, FSR 4 Redstone is AMD's latest AI-enhanced upscaling platform. Broadly speaking, it's an effort to catch up with Nvidia's equivalent DLSS technologies, which have been ahead of AMD's curve when it comes to the use of machine learning in general, along with some specific capabilities that AMD lacks.
The headline enhancement is more fully leveraging machine learning for upscaling, which is why, as we understand it and as the new AMD teaser trailer implies, Redstone will be tied to AMD's latest RDNA 4 GPUs, such as the Radeon RX 9070 XT. Only the latest AMD graphics architecture has sufficient hardware matrix math ability to run the AI code. Or so the story likely goes, anyway.
Slightly confusingly, AMD has also said that Redstone can run on Nvidia GPUs on account of being developed using code from a ROCm project known as AMD ML2CODE (Machine Learning to Code). FSR Redstone's neural rendering technology can therefore be "converted" into compute shader code. "This means that FSR Redstone's neural rendering core can also run on GPUs made by other companies," said Chris Hall, Senior Director of Software Development and head of AMD's ROCm project.
Whatever, while AMD has certainly improved its FSR upscaling over time, the general consensus is that FSR image quality lags behind that of Nvidia's competing DLSS upscaler. Could Redstone close the gap, or even put AMD ahead? We'll find out on December 10.
At the same time, AMD has also lacked certain features to compete with DLSS. One obvious example is an answer to Nvidia's Ray Reconstruction technology, which essentially accelerates and improves the image quality of various ray-tracing rendering techniques. AMD's equivalent is known as Ray Regeneration and comes as part of Redstone. As Andy mentioned a few days ago, Ray Regeneration is debuting in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, before the rest of the Redstone feature set is released.
AMD has also been slow to implement a full AI-enhanced frame generation technology. AMD does actually have that now in FSR 4, but it's expected to be enhanced for Redstone.
Another major new feature for Redstone will be neural radiance caching, which accelerates path-tracing by "continually learning how light bounces in a scene to predict and store indirect lighting."
Anywho, we've not long to wait now to see exactly what FSR Redstone is like. Will it match Nvidia's latest DLSS visual goodies? Will it be branded FSR 5? Or maybe FSR 4.1ai Max? All will be revealed in a few weeks.
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