AMD FSR 3.1 game titles 'should just work' with FSR 4 drop-in DLL file replacement hints leaker

In the original AMD FSR 4 reveal slide at CES 2025, we learned through some tucked-away text that the "AMD FSR 4 upgrade feature (is) only available on AMD Radeon RX 9070 Series Graphics for supported games with AMD FSR 3.1 already integrated", but exactly how this worked wasn't explained. Now a tip from reputable industry insider @Kepler_L2 on Twitter, indicates that the RDNA 4 driver for the AMD RX 9000 Series will simply be replacing the FSR 3.1 .dll application extensions with those for FSR 4, making for a seamless upgrade on the user's end, without requiring help from the developer.

Since AMD FSR 4 was also showcased at CES 2025 in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart without a patch being needed, this tracks with what we've previously seen of FSR 4.

This also means that "supported games with FSR 3.1 already integrated" indeed applies to all AMD FSR 3.1-enabled games. For games that aren't yet upgraded to support AMD FSR 3.1, it does unfortunately seem like developers will need to devote some resources to start supporting FSR 4 and its AI hardware-enhanced upscaling features, but once they do it seems like FSR support moving forward will be near-seamless to AMD's ability to improve it and AMD GPU architectures.

Fortunately for future buyers of the AMD RX 9070/XT and other RX 9000 Series RDNA 4-based GPUs, this process does seem to have already started, at least for some select PlayStation-to-PC ported titles. The Tweet that originally prompted @Kepler_L2's confirmation of how AMD FSR 4 is implemented over FSR 3.1 was coverage of The Last of Us Part 1 being updated to support FSR 3.1, with speculation that it was done for this purpose. The likes of Ghost of Tsushima or God of War Ragnarok have also already gotten the AMD FSR 3.1 upgrade, too — and thus, automatic FSR 4+ injection with future AMD GPUs.

If Kepler_L2's assertion is true, this shows just how smart AMD was to make AMD FSR 3.1 a forward-thinking solution that would allow for future iterations to be seamlessly slotted in without requiring developer resources to be dedicated to manually updating the game every time a new AMD GPU architecture drops. In general, it's always a shame to see older games still stuck on older versions of AMD's FSR or Nvidia's DLSS when you know your GPU could easily support a yet better-looking image upscaling implementation... but AMD seems to have solved the problem without issue this generation.