AMD says that FSR 4 might not be an RDNA 4 exclusive after all

AMD will soon launch new graphics cards, although they were pretty much absent from its CES 2025 keynote. Fortunately, a new interview with Frank Azor, AMD’s chief architect of gaming solutions and gaming marketing, gives us a little bit more information. One interesting tidbit from the interview is that FSR 4, currently an RDNA 4 exclusive, might still one day make it to older AMD GPUs.

Azor spoke to Michael Quesada in an interview that was later shared by El Chapuzas Informatico and VideoCardz. They spoke about FSR 4, but also the general price point and the predicted performance of the RX 9070 XT. Throughout the interview, it’s made clear that AMD is angling for a value-oriented product this time around.

Now, FSR 4 is an interesting point in the interview. AMD took a page out of Nvidia’s playbook this time around and made FSR 4 an RX 9000 series exclusive. In fact, that’s one of the few things we know for certain, as it came from AMD’s presentation that was shared with the press prior to the CES keynote. Previous iterations of AMD’s upscaling tech were not locked to a single generation.

It now appears that FSR 4 might one day be available to people who don’t have an RDNA 4 GPU. Azor affirmed that AMD’s heavily invested in improving ray tracing, and that it’s planning to keep growing the FSR 3 technology alongside FSR 4 because it has wider compatibility and doesn’t require machine learning.

“By using Machine Learning we can get better quality. But you need a lot of computational performance to do that. That’s why RDNA4 graphics cards are the only ones that have the power to run FSR 4 technology,” Azor told Quesada (machine translated from Spanish). “We may be able to optimize it to work on RDNA3 architecture. And we are, we want to do it, but we have work to do for now.”

This is promising, but quite unspecific — but it’s still more than Nvidia ever promised, as DLSS 3 remains an RTX 40-series exclusive, and the next iteration will be locked to the RTX 50-series.

Azor clarified that the GPUs would fall somewhere between $300 and $1,000. That’s a wide price range, but based on yesterday’s leak, we can guess that the pricing will be closer to $500 — leakers claim $480 for AMD’s reference card. He also promised that the GPUs would offer a balance of power and price that’s similar to some of AMD’s most successful launches, such as the RX 7800 XT.

Frank Azor told Quesada: “We’re going to bring a very competitive product. Everyone will win with this launch. It will be worth the wait.” He then added that AMD’s tried to make $1,000 graphics cards both in RDNA 2 and in RDNA 3, but this approach is costly. It requires three to four chips, and a lot of different resources, including people, time, and money.

He then brought up the RX 7900 GRE and the RX 7800 XT as an example of two product launches that AMD was happy with. Azor said: “The Radeon RX 7800 XT and RX 7900 GRE offered aggressive pricing for their performance. The market responded well in a market where prices are constantly rising.” Azor then reiterated that AMD’s focus is on “being a value-for-money company.”

AMD completely omitted the next-gen graphics cards during its CES 2025 keynote, and its Ryzen Z2 chips shared the same fate. To that end, Azor already told us before that AMD will soon reveal more about the RX 9000 series. He also admitted that AMD chose to wait and see what Nvidia ended up doing, and it didn’t talk about RDNA 4 because it’s planning to host a dedicated event for it shortly.

According to a new leak, preorders for the GPUs are set to open on January 23.