When it comes to image quality, the latest FSR 4 iteration of its upscaling technology definitely made AMD highly competitive with Nvidia's DLSS. But game support? Not so much. Which is why the OptiScaler tool is so handy. And so vexing when it comes to AMD itself.

OptiScaler has been updated so that it now effectively supports running AMD's FSR 4 in any game that supports DLSS 2+ or FSR 2+ and doesn't use the Vulkan API or anti-cheat technology.

Of course, the caveat is that you need a GPU based on AMD's latest RDNA 4 tech, such as the Radeon RX 9070 XT, to run FSR 4 at all. Oh, there's another caveat. For switching on FSR 4 with OptiScaler, it takes more than just a couple of mouse clicks.

In fact, for FSR 4 you have to manually install it by copy-pasting files into specific game directories, different for each title, with further settings to adjust upon install per game via a bat script.

Still, if the modding community can do it, even in this somewhat user unfriendly format, the question is why AMD can't. The official list of titles that support FSR 4 can be found here. And, frankly, it is not impressive. There are 65 titles, total, and the majority are hardly AAA classics.

So, why doesn't AMD provide a similar capability to inject FSR 4 into a wider list of games? AMD made a net profit of over $709 million on revenues of $7.4 billion in the first quarter of 2025. So, any notion that it lacks the resources doesn't bear even cursory scrutiny.

Regardless of how you turn it on, you'll need an RDNA 4 GPU like the 9070 XT to run FSR 4. (Image credit: Future)

It's frustrating because FSR 4, with its transition to AI-powered upscaling, was a major step forward for AMD. By most analyses, FSR 4's image quality falls somewhere Nvidia's DLSS 3 and its latest transformer-based DLSS 4 upscaling. FSR 3, by contrast, is generally viewed to be inferior to DLSS 3.

So, AMD has done all the difficult, expensive work getting FSR 4 developed and running nicely, only to skimp at the final implementation and game support, thereby doing a pretty effective job of undermining it.

A cynic might argue that AMD has form when it comes to this sort thing. Developing great hardware and software and then not quite finishing the job doesn't feel totally novel for AMD.

Anywho, the good news is that you may well have an option for trying to get FSR 4 running on your favourite title, provided it didn't fall at the Vulkan or anti-cheat hurdle. And if it's a game you spend a lot of time on, the slight phaff of the initial setup via OptiScaler is hardly the end of the world.