AMD has finally caught up to Nvidia's latest DLSS technologies with its recent FSR 4 update. For years, the Green Team have dominated upscaling, delivering near-native quality while boosting frame rates. Nvidia took the AI route from the start, training its neural networks on massive datasets, so each iteration improved automatically, even without manual intervention. FSR, by contrast, relied on traditional techniques — until this year, when FSR 4 finally made the jump to an AI-driven approach as well. Now, FSR 4 sits between the Transformer-based DLSS 4 and the older DLSS 3, which is to say, it’s very good. Unfortunately, the strength of any upscaler depends on adoption, and the Red Team still lags behind.
Fortunately, third-party (and often open-source) solutions are abound, if you know your way around a few files and repositories. One such app is OptiScaler — previously known as CyberXeSS — and it works to replace upscalers in a game with a different one that might be better in certain scenarios. For instance, if the game supports FSR 2 and was never updated beyond that, OptiScaler can take that FSR 2 input and convert it to DLSS, XeSS, or upconvert it to a newer version of FSR. And now, it supports FSR 4... as long as the game isn't running on Vulkan API or needs an anti-cheat. Apart from replacing upscalers, OptiScaler can also, by extension, replace frame-gen tech and even handle anti-lag features like Nvidia Reflex.
