You can force FSR 4 Redstone to work on RDNA 3 GPUs with new workaround for Linux systems — solution requires Proton compatibility to work properly

(Image credit: AMD)

AMD released FSR4 Redstone a couple of weeks back, finally giving Team Red a frame generation technology that could go toe-to-toe with Nvidia’s DLSS. However, much like its rival, AMD decided to limit it to RDNA 4, so only gamers with RX 9000-series GPUs can take advantage of the new features that arrive with the latest drivers from the company. Reddit user u/AthleteDependent926 is not having this, though, as they created a workaround that allowed older RDNA 3 GPUs to take advantage of the tech.

According to the Redditor, this technique only works with RDNA 3 hardware and Linux operating systems. Aside from this, you need to install Valve’s Proton compatibility layer to make it work properly. But after you follow all the steps correctly, you should be able to enjoy machine-learning-powered neural radiance caching and ray regeneration even on older Radeon RX 7000-series GPUs. These features complement the already existing AI upscale and frame generation that dropped with FSR4, which was also limited to AMD’s latest graphics cards.

Incidentally, the company accidentally leaked the entire source code for FSR4 in August 2025, which allowed modders to reverse engineer the technology and make it compatible with RDNA 2 cards. Both the FSR4/RDNA 2 and FSR4/RDNA 3 mods allowed older hardware to enjoy these new features, but at a much higher performance cost. According to u/AthleteDependent926, FSR4 Redstone is much more demanding than FSR3, with the latency on their AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT at 0.13ms — almost double the reported 0.07ms achieved with the older frame gen tech, but still at an acceptable level.

Some gamers were livid when they discovered that RDNA 3 could run FSR4 Redstone, saying that AMD is no different from Nvidia for artificially limiting the performance of its older hardware. However, others were quick to point out that AMD could only be doing this to help boost the sales of its current Radeon RX 9000 series GPUs, and that once the sales of these graphics cards start to taper, they’re hoping that Team Red would eventually officially release it for older models that can still run it reliably.

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Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.

4 Comments Comment from the forums

VizzieTheViz

I’d quite like this for my 7900xtx to be available eventually, but I’ve never had to use any version of fsr yet to get games playable.

Not going to bother with all kind of workarounds to get it at any rate. It’d be decent of AMD to release it for rdna3 at some point, even when it’s only when they’ve got version 5 out.
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mitch074

RDNA4 has native support for stacked 8-bit floating point instructions, which are needed for fast FSR4 support. RDNA3 does not, but AMD's erroneous commit contained an 8-bit integer version that worked quite well with RDNA3 - the difference in data type means that there are rounding errors that cause the RDNA3 version to look a bit worse.
RDNA2 and older don't support WMMA natively, which requires further emulation (also provided by AMD) with a higher cost in performance and even more rounding errors making FSR4 much slower and more buggy on those older cards.
So, I'm not surprised AMD is keeping them non-official for now : they get enough backlash from buggy features without adding some more because of even more buggy backports.
I'm more surprised AMD isn't making a fuss about these features entering mainline Mesa and Linux kernel when it's now the driver branch they officially support.
At the rate it's going, I wonder how long it's going to take for FSR2+ to be backported to even older GCN, like RT before it...
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qwertymac93

mitch074 said:
RDNA4 has native support for stacked 8-bit floating point instructions, which are needed for fast FSR4 support. RDNA3 does not, but AMD's erroneous commit contained an 8-bit integer version that worked quite well with RDNA3 - the difference in data type means that there are rounding errors that cause the RDNA3 version to look a bit worse.
RDNA2 and older don't support WMMA natively, which requires further emulation (also provided by AMD) with a higher cost in performance and even more rounding errors making FSR4 much slower and more buggy on those older cards.
So, I'm not surprised AMD is keeping them non-official for now : they get enough backlash from buggy features without adding some more because of even more buggy backports.
I'm more surprised AMD isn't making a fuss about these features entering mainline Mesa and Linux kernel when it's now the driver branch they officially support.
At the rate it's going, I wonder how long it's going to take for FSR2+ to be backported to even older GCN, like RT before it...
If AMD were upfront and explained that just like XESS, the version of FSR4 that runs on non-supported hardware was in lower precision and is provided as-is, there'd be less backlash and there would be fewer accusations of half-baked features.

Not letting older hardware get access to better quality (at the expense of performance) despite having put in the work to make it work... was bad. Letting everyone KNOW it works by accident was even worse. Just a bad look all around. And the lesson they'll likely learn from this is "don't get caught/let stuff leak". 😮‍💨
Reply
mitch074

qwertymac93 said:
If AMD were upfront and explained that just like XESS, the version of FSR4 that runs on non-supported hardware was in lower precision and is provided as-is, there'd be less backlash and there would be fewer accusations of half-baked features.

Not letting older hardware get access to better quality (at the expense of performance) despite having put in the work to make it work... was bad. Letting everyone KNOW it works by accident was even worse. Just a bad look all around. And the lesson they'll likely learn from this is "don't get caught/let stuff leak". 😮‍💨
Well, they did announce that they were looking into backporting those features - the accidental code drop was confirmation, because it's become an industry meme that AMD over-announce and under-deliver.
After that, everybody got in a huff that AMD were splitting off RDNA1-2 on their own code path AKA "dropping support". That, when there was actual code evidencing how different RDNA 1-2 and RDNA 3-4 code paths were getting.
So no - damned if they do, damned if they don't, I'll merely enjoy the eventual backporting of features to older hardware I'm still running on my backup systems, and give kudos where they're due, that the AMD driver team is actually trying to backport stuff where companies like Nvidia could give a rat's behind towards their customers' support. As for Intel I'd give them the benefit of the doubt if they weren't on the verge of bankruptcy and hadn't fired two-thirds of their Linux driver dev team.
Edit : missing negative.
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