AMD says RDNA 2 FSR 4.1 needs shader-level optimization
Radeon RX 6000 support still planned for 2027.
AMD has explained why FSR 4.1 support for RDNA 2 GPUs will take longer than the RDNA 3 version. According to TechPowerUp, AMD discussed the subject during a Computex 2026 interview with Andrej Zdravkovic, Chief Software Officer at AMD, and Terry Makedon, Senior Director of Software.
The company has already confirmed that FSR Upscaling 4.1 will expand beyond Radeon RX 9000 graphics cards. Radeon RX 7000 support is planned for July 2026, while Radeon RX 6000 support is still scheduled for 2027. AMD has not announced a specific launch date for RDNA 2.
Source: AMD
Why RDNA3 and RDNA2 need more time
RDNA 3 GPUs have AI accelerators and can run the adjusted FSR 4.1 model through INT8 instructions. RDNA 2 does not have dedicated AI accelerators, so AMD has to run the workload through the GPU’s stream processors instead.
That means FSR 4.1 on RDNA 2 will use shader resources that are also needed by the game. AMD says reducing the number of shader cycles used by the upscaler is difficult, and this is why RDNA 2 requires more optimization work before release.
This also explains why Radeon RX 6000 support is coming later than Radeon RX 7000 support. The RDNA 3 version still needs a different model from RDNA 4 because it does not use FP8, but RDNA 2 has a bigger hardware gap because it lacks dedicated AI blocks.
Hopefully AMD will accidentally ‘leak’ the FSR 4.1 for RDNA2 in July, and we will see how it runs on this hardware already.
This interview did not touch on the topic of RDNA 3.5 and integrated GPU support for FSR4 .
Source: TechPowerUP
