AMD's FSR 4.1 upscaling technology, released for RDNA 3 GPUs, is delivering lower performance than its predecessor according to new testing by German outlet ComputerBase. While the update showed improvements over native rendering, comparisons reveal significant regressions when measured against FSR 3.1 on the same hardware.

Testing across nine games on Radeon RX 7900 XTX, RX 7800 XT, and RX 7600 showed FSR 4.1 Quality mode running 11% slower than FSR 3.1, with Performance mode dropping 14.5%. The flagship 7900 XTX managed only 52.6 FPS versus 56.5 FPS on the newer RX 9070 XT in Quality mode—a 7% gap. Performance mode showed an even wider 9% difference between the cards.

The performance hit stems from fundamental architectural differences. AMD confirmed that RDNA 3 implementation uses 8-bit integer processing rather than the FP8 support built into RDNA 4's dedicated AI accelerators. This hardware limitation forces older GPUs to work harder for the same quality output, explaining the regression despite AMD's goal of cross-generation parity.

RDNA 2 support remains delayed until early 2027, with AMD noting the challenge of implementing FSR 4.1 without dedicated AI hardware. These GPUs must rely on Stream Processors for upscaling calculations, potentially creating even steeper performance penalties than seen on RDNA 3.