AMD's FSR 3.1 finally arrives, sporting an improved upscaler for less ghosting, flickering, and shimmering in games

Three months after officially announcing the 3.1 update to its FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) technology suite, five games from Sony have all been patched to the new system. Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon Forbidden West, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, and the two Spider-Man games now sport an improved shader-based upscaler and decoupled frame generation so that more PC gamers can enjoy the same boost in performance, but with better-looking results than before.

When AMD announced its third generation of FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) with its Radeon RX 7000-series GPU launch in November 2022, many PC gamers hoped that it would include an upgrade upscaler but it transpired that FSR 3.0's only new feature was a shader-based frame generation system.

The FSR 2.2 upscaler was still being used and while it does a serviceable job, in terms of increasing frame rates, its visual quality could be noticeably worse than Nvidia's DLSS Super Resolution in some games.

That's the first big change in FSR 3.1 as AMD has improved its shader algorithm for the upscaler, claiming that it has "improved temporal stability, reducing flickering and shimmering, and enhanced ghosting reduction and better detail preservation" than the old system.

On its blog announcing the public launch of the update, AMD has a short comparison video of FSR 2.2 and FSR 3.1, but tech YouTuber Daniel Owen has done a more in-depth look, comparing the new system to Nvidia's DLSS.

In Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, the improvements are very clear to see, or rather, where the older upscaler struggled, the new one is markedly better. You're not getting any additional performance as such, just far less flickering and shimmering where you've got an object rapidly moving or characters with lots of fur on them.

Something else that FSR 3.1 brings to the table is a decoupled frame generator. In FSR 3.0, you could only use AMD's frame interpolator with its shader-based upscaler. One of the first games to roadtest the separation of the two was Ghost of Tsushima, allowing graphics cards such as Nvidia's RTX 30-series and Intel's Arc range to run their own upscalers but with AMD's frame generator.

Now that FSR 3.1 has been fully released, four more games have been patched to follow suit—Horizon Forbidden West, the aforementioned Ratchet and Clank, Spider-Man Remastered, and Spider-Man: Miles Morales. At some point very soon, the port of God of War: Ragnarok will also get updated to the new version.

AMD has streamlined the FSR software package for developers and added support for Vulkan and the Xbox platform, so we should hopefully see FSR 3.1 being used in all forthcoming game releases. The SDK for the updated tech will be publicly released next month so we should be able to see what changes AMD has implemented under the hood of its upscaler to improve the visual quality of the system.