AMD launched its FSR "Redstone" update in December 2025 as part of the AMD Adrenalin 25.12.1 driver package, bringing to a close months of speculation after the upgraded upscaling tech was first revealed at Computex 2025.
As expected, AMD's ML-powered FSR Redstone update launched with availability only for its latest Radeon RX 9000 graphics cards using the RDNA 4 architecture. PC gamers using AMD's older RDNA 3 GPUs were largely left out in the cold, watching as adopters of the newer hardware got to test out new FSR Upscaling, Frame Generation, Ray Regeneration, and Radiance Caching techniques.
Why didn't AMD launch Redstone on its older hardware? It all comes down to performance. The new ML-powered techniques are designed specifically for RDNA 4's newfound AI performance, just like NVIDIA's latest AI-powered DLSS 4.5 improvements are largely reserved for its latest RTX 5000 Blackwell GPUs.
In a recent interview at CES 2026 with PC World, AMD's Senior VP of GPU Technologies and Engineering, Andrej Zdravkovic, reiterated that the full set of Redstone features will remain closely linked to RDNA 4.
Zdravkovic explains that the latest Redstone features simply don't perform as they should on older AMD GPUs. Subext? It's not a case of barring older hardware to drive sales of the latest Radeon RX 9000 cards.
The technology just moves forward. So our products get better and better, get new features, get new throughput in terms of either clock or memory. So, at one point in time, some new technology just simply will not provide the right experience. It's not a question of whether you want to enable it or not. If we enable it, it actually doesn't give the right experience to the end user. It's useless.
Andrej Zdravkovic
Zdravkovic adds that while some of the Redstone features are useful and can actually be performed on some of AMD's older cards, internal testing reveals that "the net result is not going to improve the experience."
When pressed about PC enthusiasts forcing the latest FSR updates onto unsupported GPUs, Zdravkovic has a very reasonable response.
Frankly, all the power to them. I'm a geek myself, so I would do that for any technology. Just try, whether it works or not. And frankly, it may work for their specific title, for their specific machine. What we do, we try to provide a seamless experience to all the gamers. The combinations of the games, memory systems, processors, GPUs out there actually doesn't allow us to create a product that will make most of our users happy. So that's why we decided to cut the line.
Andrej Zdravkovic
Zdravkovic is then asked about AMD releasing a Redstone "Beta" that works on older AMD RDNA 3 GPUs, which would give gamers more control over their system. He responds, "That's currently not in the plan, but thanks for the hint. We may want to think about something like that, provide that to people who want to play with that."
That doesn't sound much like a door slamming shut, does it?
(via Tom's Hardware)
Do you think AMD will ever release an official FSR Redstone update for RDNA 3 GPUs? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments section below!
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