With AMD recently having announced that its FSR 4.1 upscaling technology will be coming to GPUs based on its RDNA 3 and RDNA 2 architectures, YouTuber Moore’s Law is Dead believes that this will give the Xbox Series X a boost over the PS5 in terms of performance. While AMD’s announcement was meant for computer GPUs, the idea that the same technology might make its way to console hardware doesn’t seem too far-fetched, since FSR 2 is used on both consoles anyway.
In a video, Moore’s Law is Dead has said that this technology is quite likely to come to Xbox Series X/S and PS5 after it comes out for RDNA 2-based PC GPUs in 2027. “Could FSR 4.1 come to the current-gen game consoles? I’m talking about Xbox Series X, Series S, and PlayStation 5. And the short answer, I believe, is actually yes, but it’s not a clear-cut yes,” he said in a video.
Since AMD’s announcement revolves around being able to modify FSR 4.1 to work with older hardware that lacks dedicated floating point neural net hardware, instead relying on INT8 modules, Moore’s Law is Dead brought up performance comparisons. He showed off a chart of the INT8 performance on PS5 Pro with its 300 TOPS (trillion operations per second), the Xbox Series X with 48.6 TOPS, the PS5 with 20 TOPS, and the Xbox Series S with 16 TOPS. This, he says, indicates that Xbox Series X will benefit more from FSR 4.1 than the base PS5 would.
“I think Xbox Series X is going to be fine at running this. Will it get the same boost that PS5 Pro gets from PSSR 2? No, it won’t. But it’ll get a nice boost,” he said. “I don’t think it’ll be huge, but I do think there’s a chance you could have the Xbox Series X running like a higher quality mode of FSR 4.1 than what the PS5 can handle. And that is just a clear-cut advantage to Xbox Series X next year, presumably when they get this.”
Moore’s Law is Dead also pointed to the fact that the Xbox SDK will also play a role in helping developers implement FSR 4.1 for Xbox Series X. According to developers he spoke to, the SDK already seems to have plugins supporting “FSR 3 and later”, while Sony’s PS5 SDK doesn’t offer FSR support past 2.2. However, this might also come down to the fact that Sony has developed its own AI-based upscaler with the help of AMD: PSSR.
“I talked to some game devs today… one thing they brought up about the PlayStation versus Xbox SDKs is that Xbox already has… some plugins for FSR 3 and later,” he said. “Sony stopped upgrading FSR plugins at around 2.2. I think there might still be ways to get FSR 3.1 into a PlayStation game, but it’s not as easy as just a direct plugin to activate it in the SDK. And so Sony would need to actually wake up and start adding support for later FSR than 2.2 to even get to 4.1.”
