FSR has long had the disadvantage of not being user-upgradable, unlike DLSS, forcing gamers to wait patiently for game devs to upgrade FSR in their favorite titles. However, that appears to be changing, according to DLSS Swapper on X, GitHub users have uncovered that FSR 3.1 games can be upgraded to FSR 4 by manually replacing the game's FSR 3.1 DLL files with DLL files from AMD's latest FSR SDK 2.0.
The process is remarkably similar to the way Nvidia users have been able to manually upgrade DLSS to newer versions over the past several years. FSR SDK 2.0 comes with three internal DLLs: "amd_fidelityfx_framegeneration_dx12.dll", "amd_fidelityfx_loader_dx12.dll", and "amd_fidelityfx_upscaler_dx12.dll". Several users found that renaming the loader DLL file to "amd_fidelityfx_dx12", then dropping all three DLLs in the same directory where a FSR 3.1 game's FSR DLL files are located, upgrades the game to FSR 4. (The FSR 4 and FSR 3.1 DLLs cannot coexist, so it is also necessary to delete the FSR 3.1 DLLs.)
Someone on our GitHub just did a manual DLL swap and got FSR 4 to work on a FSR 3.1 game 🤯That means the SDK with those new FSR DLLs will allow any FSR 3.1 game to use FSR 4 sooner rather than later. https://t.co/EUAdkbk1JIAugust 28, 2025
One user demonstrated the DLL swap working in Horizon Zero Dawn: Remastered, which is just one of a handful of games that report the actual FSR version running in-game. The user posted a screenshot of the game's graphics settings with the FSR SDK 2.0 DLL files swapped in, showing FSR 4.0.2 in the upscaling options.
However, there are some hiccups; some users have reported that FSR 4 won't trigger in Linux, even on RX 9000 series hardware. Additionally, this trick won't magically make FSR 4 run on older Radeon graphics cards older than the RX 9000 series. Running an older Radeon card in-game with the aforementioned DLLs swapped in will run the game on FSR version 3.1.5. Still, DLL swapping works (for the most part), and there have been very few user reports so far complaining about game crashes from upgrading to FSR 4 with this method.
DLL swapping was the main way Nvidia users manually upgraded DLSS versions in-game, before Nvidia introduced DLSS override modes in the Nvidia app. DLL swapping is technically a mod, and doesn't always work without bugs, but it has worked on the Nvidia side since DLSS 2.0 was released five years ago. PC game developers don't always keep their upscalers up-to-date, so having the ability to manually update a game's upscaler(s) is often the only way to get the latest upscaling optimizations and quality updates.
Now, AMD users have the same capabilities that Nvidia users have enjoyed for so many years. FSR 4 DLL swapping will likely be the primary method of upgrading FSR 3.1 games to FSR 4 and beyond until AMD develops a proper counterpart to Nvidia's DLSS override tool. AMD has promised that future Adrenalin updates will add FSR 4 support to specific games independently of game developers, but there's no telling how frequent these updates will be.
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