Hot on the heels of one of AMD's David McAfee suggesting that the company might dust off the blueprints for its Zen 3 CPUs for another production run, another exec let out a hint about AMD's future plans with FSR 4. In an interview at CES, AMD's president of GPU Technologies and Chief Software Officer Andrej Zdravković suggested that the FSR 4 Redstone technology might be open-sourced. The statements come in the wake of an accidental release of the FSR 4 code earlier this year.
The hint came during a Q&A that Tom's Hardware attended when Chips and Cheese's George Cozma asked Zdravković if an open-source release was in the cards. The software head responded that the accidental public release in August was unexpected, but that it intends to release the source for the FSR4 library while keeping the core technology closed, so as not to give Nvidia engineers an advantage.
He continued by stating that AMD intends to "work as openly as possible," and was then asked to be specific about FRS 4's open release. Zdravković then said "that's the long-term plan," seemingly corroborating an earlier remark that "open sourcing is in [AMD's heart and mind]".
While the Radeon chief's words aren't a direct statement, it's likely that FSR 4 will see an official open-source release sooner rather than later. The August leak was by way of a GitHub repository that was part of FidelityFX SDK, which itself bears a broad MIT license, except for a handful of specific files.
Many have taken this to mean that although AMD pulled the source code down, theoretically it can't put the genie back in the bottle, as all of the published data, including the core AI model and its weights (a critical piece to replicate the technology), was arguably MIT-licensed for a brief moment in time.
Keeping FSR 4 as an exclusive selling point for 9000-series Radeon cards might not really be a realistic option anymore, either. As soon as they got their hands on the source code, industrious modders quickly tweaked the algorithm to work on RDNA 3 and older cards, and even on 3000-series GeForces.
While this comes with a hefty performance penalty versus running it on contemporary cards, many found the quality-versus-performance tradeoff very much worth it, given the significantly better output of the FSR 4 model. Don't be surprised if that FSR 4 GitHub repository pops up again soon.
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