Radeon GPU users just got an excellent free upgrade courtesy of Steam Deck

(Image credit: AMD)

published 19 March 2022

AMD makes some of the best graphics cards around, and if you have a stand-alone Radeon RX 5000-series or newer graphics card, you just got an excellent free upgrade.

That's because if you download the latest AMD drivers, you'll be able to take advantage of one of the Steam Deck's best features, which delivers better framerates through clever software.

In the Steam Deck it's called FidelityFX Super Resolution, and in PCs it's Radeon Super Resolution (RSR). It's a way of boosting the framerates in any game by slightly reducing your game's resolution and then whacking the framerate right up, and according to AMD it'll do amazing things in any game.

Faster framerates and amazing upscaling too

According to The Verge, AMD has something even better on the horizon: a new version of FSR that rivals Nvidia's DLSS. It uses a technology called Temporary Upscaling to deliver higher quality at higher framerates, and according to AMD it'll even work on competitors' GPUs.

We're not entirely sure how that'll work and AMD hasn't gone into detail yet. but according to AMD director Glen Matthews it doesn't use machine learning – which is why it doesn't require a new processor. It uses "previous frame color, depth and motion vectors in the rendering pipeline to create very high-quality upscaled output with optimized anti-aliasing across all image quality presets and output resolutions." AMD says there'll be much more detail announced next week on 23 March. In the meantime you can see the results of both RSR and FSR 2.0 in the video below.

Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).